A ‘magic portal’ now marks the eastern end of North Carolina’s Mountains-to-Sea Trail
%20(1)%20(1).jpeg "A monument marking the beginning and the end of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail was unveiled in Jockey’s Ridge State Park in Nags Head on Sept. 29, 2023. The trail runs 1,175 miles from the park to Great Smoky Mountains National Park.")
The Mountains-to-Sea Trail, which stretches 1,175 miles across North Carolina, now has a special marker at one end.
A large wooden monument marks the spot in Jockey’s Ridge State Park where the trail begins and ends on the Outer Banks. The park and Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail unveiled the monument late last week.
Ben Jones, who oversees the coastal section of the trail for the friends group, designed and built the monument in his garage before it was reassembled at the park. To both reflect and endure the coastal environment, Jones made it from treated pine dock pilings held together with more than 300 galvanized screws.
It’s essentially a 10-by-11.5-foot wall with a large circle cut out of the center and the top contoured to represent the state’s mountains, Piedmont and coastal plain. The big circle frames the massive sand dunes of Jockey’s Ridge but also makes it easy to pass through the two-foot-thick wall.
“I wanted it to be interactive and inspire people to touch it, sit or lay in it, climb it, and be able to experience it in their own fun and personal ways,” Jones wrote in an email.
The opening is surrounded by a white band of high-density polyethylene proclaiming the “Eastern Terminus” of the trail, including the latitude and longitude and the elevation, 75 feet.
Jones, who has a background in landscape architecture, said he was nearly finished building the monument when a group of kids approached to see and play on it. They told him it looked like some sort of magic portal, like the one in the movie ”Doctor Strange” based on a Marvel Comics superhero.
“I had to laugh because they were totally right,” Jones said. “A portal is a pretty good metaphor for the start or end of a long journey hiking this trail.”
The western end of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail is atop Clingmans Dome, which at 6,643-feet is the highest point in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. A small gray wooden sign marks the spot, but Betsy Brown, associate director of the trail friends group, says it hopes to work with the National Park Service to erect a similar monument there.
“We’d ideally love to duplicate the shape, with materials being suited for the site,” Brown said.
For more information about the trail, including maps, go to mountainstoseatrail.org/.
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This story was originally published October 6, 2023 at 10:35 AM.
