Mount Mitchell State Park Guide

Mount Mitchell tops out at 6,684 feet — the highest point in the United States east of the Mississippi River, higher than anything in New England or the Rockies’ eastern cousins — and you can drive to a paved lot near the top and walk a short ramp to the summit observation deck. It’s named for Elisha Mitchell, the professor who measured it and then died in 1857 falling from a waterfall on the mountain while trying to prove his numbers; he’s buried at the summit. The air up here is thin, cold, and often socked in fog, with a spruce-fir forest that feels like Canada dropped into the South.