The Grandfather mountain, in the extreme southern corner of Watauga county, is the highest point of the Blue Ridge. The elevation is 5,897 feet, and being 35 miles in an air-line distant from the loftier summits of the Black mountains, and fifteen miles from the Roan, over-topping as it does all the nearer peaks by an altitude of nearly 1,000 feet, it commands an almost limitless view of mountain country. It merits the name of Grandfather, for its rocks are of the Archæan age, and the oldest out-croppings on the globe. Two other reasons for its name are ascribed; one from the profile of a man’s face seen from the Watauga river; the other from the resemblance of the rhododendrons, when clad in ice and snow, to the white, flowing beard of a patriarch. Differing from all the mountains of the South, dense labyrinths of rhododendrons and pines begin at its base. The traveler enters their shadows by the road-side, and for two and a half miles, the distance from Calloway’s to the summit, they are continually with him. Although the first two miles are often accomplished on horseback, it is too steep for easy riding. The path winds like the trail of a serpent, brushing by the bases of low, vine-draped cliffs, around yellow hemlocks, and disappearing in the rocky channel of a torrent, or into hedges of rhododendrons. On the morning that I made the ascent, I was impressed with the noticeable absence of birds. Not a note from a feathered songster resounded through the forest. No life was visible or audible, except occasionally on the cliffs, quick-eyed lizards, of the color of the rocks, appeared and then disappeared in the mossed crevices of the stone. One-half mile from the summit, under a tall, dark cliff whose cold face seems never to have been kissed by sunlight, bubbles a large spring. Its water is of a temperature less than eight degrees above the freezing point. This, as far as is known, is the coldest spring south of New York state. Here the steepest part of the ascent begins. At intervals old logs are piled across the narrow trail, and in places rocks have set themselves on edge. Grasses grow rankly with weeds and ferns. These, covered with the moisture of the clouds that had dropped with the night about the forehead of the Grandfather, and only lifted with daylight, wet the person pushing through them as thoroughly as if he had fallen in the torrent. The summit of the mountain is a narrow, ragged ridge, covered with balsams. If these trees were cleared from the central pinnacle, a sweeping view toward every point of the compass could be obtained, without change of position. As it is, they obstruct the vision, and to see out on every side it is necessary to move to three points, all close together, known as the Watauga, Caldwell, and Burke views.