My Favorite Spot On The Planet – Featured Columnist

Jumping for joy in his younger days . . . Not necessarily recommended too close to the edge.
Jumping for joy in his younger days . . . Not necessarily recommended too close to the edge.

Our ankles are bound loosely, with a length of that scratchy Manila hemp rope. The other end of the rope is affixed to a small pine ten feet away. We can still move around, but not much.

No, this is not a hostage situation or punishment for bad behavior. In fact, it’s a safeguard. We’re camping on the rocks of the very summit of McAfees Knob, and my dad has us kids -my three siblings and a cousin- tied up so we don’t wander in the night and fall off the cliff. After all, there’s a five-story drop not twenty feet from where we cozily lay.

We’re sharing a few old flannel-lined sleeping bags. We put out the foil dinner campfire a while ago, (you do know what a foil dinner is, right?), and as we kids settle in for the night. I can hear on the neighboring slab of sandstone my dad blowing up his U.S. Army surplus air mattress but no padding beyond the cotton sleeping bags for us kids; we’re tough!

The rock may be hard beneath our young bony bodies but the stars are coming out and the night insects are in full symphony. It’s the summer of 1964 and I’m six years old and there’s no place I’d rather be.

McAfees Knob is a place I often describe as my favorite spot on the planet. I believe some of my earliest memories ever – even before the kid camping trips – are of picnicking on the summit when I was not much beyond infant-hood.

Today it’s a four-mile hike, but when I was little it was possible to drive much of the way to the summit on a fire road off of Rt. 311. That is if one didn’t care too much about the car. My family had a black 1952 Ford, and hauling four kids around everywhere had tarnished it to the point that hitting a few rocks on the way up the mountain wasn’t a problem.

Besides the herking and jerking and heaving of the Ford on the approach to the summit, those early McAfee’s picnic memories include the smell and feel of the dirt and the rock, and my grubby little hands on the resident huckleberries that were blue and ripe in late July. I remember too the green and red Coleman stove, my dad young and relaxed and smiling over it as he fries Spam, onions and beans.

And I remember that incomprehensible view.

Later as a Boy Scout, we amused ourselves one frigid winter morning by throwing frozen oranges against the rock walls (it was twenty below zero in Roanoke the previous night!). There was also the time we were sleeping under the stars among the McAfees rocks and two bears woke us up by rummaging through our pots, pans and Pop Tarts.

One summer during high school I was lucky enough to help my friend Rocky paint a 100-year-old farmhouse that is nestled in the valley just below McAfee’s summit. Quite a few times during that project we bushwhacked our way straight up to the top, for a picnic lunch or just for a gaze out over the expanse, unable to resist the siren song pull of the mountain top that affects me to this day.

It’s a romantic place and I’m sure I’m not the only one in whose life the mountain has figured prominently in dates and courting. My wife and I consider camping on the Knob as one of our best early adventures together.

It’s also a family place; all those times of hiking up there with our sons when they were kids resulted in not only lots of blisters but an abundance of happy memories. And our children are not the only ones who were visiting McAfee’s summit before they could even walk, carried in packs on their parents’ backs; the tradition among young families continues to the present.

Besides human youngsters, there is always other wildlife to see on the mountain too. Bear and snake – especially rattlesnake – encounters are always exciting, and I recently saw a Great Grey Owl and a Scarlet Tanager on the flanks of the mountain

Early in my trying-to-make-a-living-and-raise-a-family career, I discovered how hiking and running on the trails around Roanoke helped me retain a semblance of calm and order in my life, and once again McAfees played a big role. I have solved, if not the problems of the world, at least some of my own during hundreds of jogs up to the summit.

Today McAfee’s Knob is well known as one of the most spectacular and memorable spots along the entire 2200-mile Appalachian Trail, and it’s a popular day hike for folks from near and far. The image of that ancient sandstone rock jutting majestically into space over the Catawba Valley, often with a hiker positioned poetically upon it, is disseminated all over the world, and not just in private collections. The image has been used in everything from advertisements for granola bars and investment firms to adornment for license plates.

I still hike or jog up McAfees whenever I can, no matter the season. After all, It is my favorite spot on the planet.

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