Conservation group buys NC mountaintop for rock climbers after 30-year effort
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Blue Ridge Conservancy purchased Howard Knob to protect 74 acres for climbers.
- Site features gneiss boulder fields offering technical routes and durable rock.
- Conservancy is raising funds for trails and hopes to open Howard Knob in 2026.
The Blue Ridge Conservancy has sealed a deal to purchase Howard Knob after trying for 30 years to make sure the site overlooking Boone and coveted by rock climbers would never be developed.
Known to locals mostly as Howard’s Knob, the site is the summit of a mountain named for Benjamin Howard, a British loyalist said to have hidden in a cave near the knob during the Revolutionary War.
The knob is covered in boulders of gneiss, a hard stone that makes for technically challenging routes and doesn’t crumble as climbers traverse its face.
The conservancy says it’s raising money for trails and amenities and hopes to open the 74-acre property to the public sometime in 2026.
“Blue Ridge Conservancy is excited to reopen this historic climbing area and create additional hiking trails on the mountain, including the future location of the Northern Peaks State Trail,” Eric Hiegl, BRC’s senior director of land protection and conservation planning, said in an announcement about the purchase on the group’s website. “Land conservation projects have their own time schedule and happen when the time is right. Luckily for us the time to Save Howard Knob is now.”
The conservancy grew out of the first push to “Save The Knob” in 1993.
Area residents and students attending Appalachian State University knew the site from the late 1970s, when President Jimmy Carter’s Department of Energy selected it for the placement of an experimental wind turbine. It was celebrated at the time as the world’s largest windmill, with blades 97 feet long. The huge turbine was supposed to generate enough electricity to power hundreds of homes, but mostly it generated complaints from people who said it rattled the windows in their homes and interfered with their television reception.
The turbine was dismantled in 1983 and the 5-acre site where it sat became a Watauga County park.
In 1993, Floridian Monte Green bought an adjacent 74 acres of Howard Knob that contained a large boulder field and some of the best views from the mountain. Protesters gathered to try to protect the site, and the only home built there was Green’s, though he banned climbers from the property.
The boulders are so unusual and so attractive to climbers the site has been written about in Climbing magazine.
“The Howard Knob project was the catalyst that started the land conservation movement in the High Country,” conservationist and former High Country Conservancy Executive Director Michelle Merritt Leonard said in the announcement. “The energy around that project was hopeful and electric, attracting people to get on board! To see the community that Blue Ridge Conservancy has created around protecting our landscape is truly heartwarming. In the blink of an eye, it’s 30 years later, and we’re all coming together to see the project through. That’s something special.”
The conservancy bought the land from Green. It did not announce a purchase price.
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