The highest point of every US state

Nothing else in North America comes close. Denali rises 6,190 m in the Alaska Range, and because its base sits barely 600 m above sea level, the vertical relief from foot to summit is greater than Everest's — around 5,500 m of mountain standing in one piece above the tundra.

The first ascent, and the one before it

The summit was reached on 7 June 1913 by a party led by Hudson Stuck, an Episcopal archdeacon, with Harry Karstens, Robert Tatum and Walter Harper. Harper, a 21-year-old Athabascan, stepped onto the top first — a detail Stuck recorded deliberately. Three years earlier the so-called Sourdough Expedition, a group of Fairbanks miners with no climbing experience, had hauled a spruce pole up the North Peak (5,934 m), the lower of the two summits, and left it there. Stuck's party saw the pole from the South Peak, which settled an argument that had run for years.

Routes

Roughly nine climbers in ten use the West Buttress, the line Bradford Washburn worked out from the air in 1951. It is not technically hard by modern standards, but it is long, cold and high: three weeks on the mountain is normal, with caches, double carries and days of waiting out weather. The West Rib, the Cassin Ridge and the Muldrow Glacier are serious undertakings by comparison.

Getting there and what it costs

Climbers fly from Talkeetna onto the Kahiltna Glacier at about 2,200 m. The National Park Service requires registration 60 days before the start of the climb, and charges a mountaineering special use fee — currently several hundred dollars per climber. Only a handful of concessionaires are licensed to guide here, among them Alpine Ascents, Rainier Mountaineering, Mountain Trip and Alaska Mountaineering School.

Advice worth taking

The season runs from early May to early July, and most summit days fall in the second half of June. Temperatures of −40 °C with wind are a normal part of the trip, not an emergency. Success rates hover near half; the usual reason for turning around is not the climbing but the weather window that never opens. The federal name has moved between Denali and Mount McKinley more than once, but in Alaska it has only ever been Denali.

Mount Whitney is the highest point in the lower 48 states at 4,421 m, and it stands at the southern end of the Sierra Nevada barely 135 km from Badwater Basin in Death Valley, the lowest point in the United States. People have walked between the two on purpose.

First ascent

On 18 August 1873 three fishermen from the town of Lone Pine — Charles Begole, A. H. Johnson and John Lucas — reached the summit on what was, for them, an afternoon's excursion. They had intended to climb the peak that bears the name of Josiah Whitney, the state geologist, and did; the confusion over which summit was which took a few more years to settle. The Mountaineer's Route, the steep gully on the east face, was climbed by John Muir that same year.

Routes

The Mount Whitney Trail is the standard: about 35 km round trip from Whitney Portal with 1,900 m of gain, walkable in a very long day by fit hikers, and far more pleasant over two with a camp at Trail Camp. The 99 switchbacks above it are famous and tedious in equal measure. The Mountaineer's Route is a scrambling line that saves distance and adds exposure; the East Face and East Buttress are rock climbs.

Permits

This is the part that catches people out. Quota season runs from 1 May to 1 November, and both day hikes and overnights need a permit from a lottery held in February and March. Demand far exceeds supply. Human waste must be carried out in a WAG bag, which is issued with the permit and is not optional.

Advice worth taking

Whitney Portal sits at 2,550 m and the summit is nearly two kilometres above it, so altitude, not fitness, is what turns most people back. Sleeping a night or two at the Portal or in the Owens Valley before the climb makes a real difference. Afternoon thunderstorms are routine in July and August: start in the dark, be off the crest by early afternoon.

Mount Rainier is an active stratovolcano of 4,392 m carrying 26 named glaciers — the largest glacier system on any single peak in the contiguous states. It dominates the skyline from Seattle, 95 km away, and locals simply say "the mountain is out" when the clouds lift. It belongs to the Cascade Range.

First ascent

Hazard Stevens and P. B. Van Trump reached the summit on 17 August 1870, guided to the mountain's flank by Sluiskin, a Yakama man who thought the plan reckless and waited below. The pair spent a night near the crater rim, kept from freezing by volcanic steam vents — an improvisation that became part of the mountain's standard lore.

Routes

The Disappointment Cleaver route through Camp Muir (3,080 m) takes the large majority of climbers: a high camp, an alpine start around midnight, and crevassed glacier travel on the Ingraham. Emmons–Winthrop from the north-east is the other common line, longer and quieter. Neither is a hike; rope teams, crampons and crevasse rescue are the baseline, and the mountain's snow bridges change from week to week.

Permits and guides

Every climber above 3,000 m needs a climbing permit and pays an annual cost-recovery fee, with wilderness camping permits on top for the high camps. Three concessionaires hold the guiding licences: Rainier Mountaineering Inc., International Mountain Guides and Alpine Ascents. Guided ascents book out months ahead for summer weekends.

Advice worth taking

Around ten thousand people attempt the summit each year and roughly half make it, which makes Rainier an honest rehearsal for Denali — many climbers use it exactly that way. The season runs May to September, with June and July the most reliable. The real hazards are objective: rockfall off the Cleaver in the afternoon heat, and the volcano's own capacity for debris flows.

Mount Elbert is the highest point of the Rocky Mountains and of everything drained by the Mississippi, at 4,401 m — and it is also, by common agreement, the easiest fourteener in Colorado. A marked trail runs to the top. Nothing about it requires a rope, which is why it collects both serious mountaineers and people in trainers who heard it was walkable.

History

Henry W. Stuckle of the Hayden Survey is credited with the first recorded ascent in 1874. The name honours Samuel Hitt Elbert, a territorial governor, and it caused a long sulk among supporters of Mount Massive four kilometres away, which is shorter by about four metres. Partisans of Massive are said to have built summit cairns to close the gap; partisans of Elbert knocked them down.

Routes

The North Mount Elbert Trail from Halfmoon Creek is the usual choice: roughly 17 km round trip with 1,400 m of gain. The South Trail is slightly longer and quieter. Black Cloud Trail from the south-west adds distance and solitude in equal measure. In winter the same lines become ski and snowshoe outings, with avalanche terrain to judge.

Getting there

Leadville is the base town, twenty minutes away and itself at 3,100 m — useful for acclimatising, awkward for sleeping. The trailheads are reached on forest roads passable to most cars in summer. There is no permit and no fee; the constraint is parking, which fills before dawn on summer weekends.

Advice worth taking

Colorado's afternoon thunderstorms are not a rumour: the standard discipline is to start at four in the morning and be off the summit by noon, every day from July to early September. The altitude does the rest of the filtering — many people who turn around are fit and simply arrived from sea level the day before.

After Denali, Gannett Peak is the hardest state high point to reach in the country — not because of the climbing, but because of where it is. At 4,209 m in the Wind River Range, it sits behind thirty-odd kilometres of wilderness in every direction, and no road gets closer.

History

The accepted first ascent is 1922, by Arthur Tate and Floyd Stahlnaker. Earlier claims exist and cannot be settled; the Wind Rivers were trapper and surveyor country long before anyone was counting summits. The peak carries the name of Henry Gannett, chief geographer of the US Geological Survey, who never climbed it.

Routes

Three approaches dominate. The Glacier Trail from Dubois runs about 40 km one way and gains and loses a punishing amount of height on the way in. Elkhart Park into Titcomb Basin is the scenic standard, with a high crossing of Bonney Pass that must be done twice. Green River Lakes is longer still. All of them end at the Gooseneck Glacier, where the actual climb begins: snow to around 45 degrees, a bergschrund that varies from a step to a problem, and a short rock finish.

What it takes

Crampons, ice axe, rope and glacier travel skills are not optional, and most parties budget five to seven days. There is no permit for the climb itself, though the surrounding wilderness has camping regulations worth reading. Mosquitoes in July are spoken of in the same tone as the weather.

Advice worth taking

July and August are the season; by September nights are hard and the snow bridges are thin. Summit day from a camp in Titcomb Basin is long — fourteen hours is normal — and the crux for most people is the second crossing of Bonney Pass on tired legs. Go with a forecast you trust: the range makes its own weather, and there is no quick way out.

Kings Peak, 4,123 m, sits in the middle of the Uinta Mountains — the only major range in the contiguous states that runs east to west rather than north to south. That quirk of geology is why the approach feels so long: you walk in along a drainage rather than up a valley aimed at the peak.

History

No single first ascent is recorded, which fits a summit that shepherds and surveyors reached without ceremony. The name honours Clarence King, first director of the US Geological Survey and the man who exposed the Great Diamond Hoax of 1872 — a better story than most summit namesakes can claim.

Routes

Almost everyone starts at Henrys Fork trailhead: about 45 km round trip, usually split over two or three days with a camp at Dollar Lake. The trail crosses Gunsight Pass, and here most parties face the standard dilemma — the official trail drops and contours, while a well-worn shortcut cuts straight across a boulder field. The shortcut saves an hour and costs ankles. The summit ridge itself is a long scramble over talus, not technical but tiring at the end of a long day.

Getting there

The trailhead is three hours from Salt Lake City, the last stretch on good gravel. This is High Uintas Wilderness: no permit for day use, free self-registration at the trailhead, and the usual wilderness rules on groups and campfires.

Advice worth taking

July through September is the window; snow lingers in the basins into early July and the first storms arrive in late September. Afternoon thunderstorms are as reliable as in Colorado, and the summit ridge is exactly where you do not want to be when one does. Moose are common around Dollar Lake and deserve more respect than they usually get.

Granite Peak, 3,904 m in the Beartooth Mountains, is the hardest of the lower-48 state high points. It was also the last of the fifty to be climbed — not until 1923 — which tells you most of what you need to know about its reputation.

History

Elers Koch, James Whilt and R. T. Ferguson made the first ascent on 29 August 1923, after several failed attempts by earlier parties. Koch was a Forest Service man who had been trying on and off for years. By then Denali had been climbed for a decade; Granite simply hid behind an approach that discouraged casual visitors and a summit block that turned them back.

Routes

The standard line starts at Mystic Lake and climbs onto the Froze-to-Death Plateau — a vast boulder field at 3,500 m with no water and no shelter, usually taken as a long approach day. From the plateau's edge the route drops to a col, crosses a snow bridge that shrinks through the season, and finishes with several hundred metres of rock at class 4 to low fifth. Most parties rope up for it; many bring a light rack.

What it takes

Helmet, rope, crampons and ice axe for the snow, and a tolerance for exposed scrambling at altitude. The success rate hovers around half, and the reason is almost always weather: the plateau offers nowhere to hide, and storms build fast over the Beartooths.

Advice worth taking

Mid-July to early September is the window. Budget three days, carry all your water for the plateau or plan your melt, and have a hard turnaround time — the descent of the summit block in wet conditions is where accidents happen. Mountain goats patrol the plateau and will chew anything salty left outside a tent.

Borah Peak is 3,859 m in the Lost River Range, and it is the state high point people remember for one feature: Chicken-Out Ridge, a knife of broken rock partway up with a name that explains itself.

History

T. M. Bannon of the US Geological Survey made the first recorded ascent in 1912. The mountain is named for William Borah, a long-serving Idaho senator. It has a better claim to fame than either: on 28 October 1983 a magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck directly beneath it, lifting the peak about 30 cm and dropping the valley floor by more than two metres. The fault scarp it left is still plainly visible from the road, a raw step running across the sagebrush.

Routes

There is essentially one route, and it is brutally direct: about 11 km round trip with 1,700 m of gain, which is among the steepest sustained trails in the country. The first two-thirds is a relentless climb through sagebrush and scree. Then comes Chicken-Out Ridge — class 3 scrambling with real exposure on both sides — followed by a snow bridge that persists into midsummer and is the crux for most people. After that a short slog leads to the top.

Getting there

The trailhead is off US-93 between Mackay and Challis, on a short gravel road, and there is no permit or fee. Mackay is the nearest town and it is small; stock up in Idaho Falls or Salmon.

Advice worth taking

Late July through September is the season, once the snow bridge has melted out — before that, bring an axe and know how to use it. The ridge is harder coming down than going up, which surprises people. Start early: there is no water on the route and the south-facing slope bakes by midday.

Mount Hood, 3,429 m, is a dormant volcano in the Cascade Range and probably the most climbed glaciated peak in the country — around ten thousand attempts a year. The reason is access: a ski lift runs from the lodge to 2,600 m, and the standard route starts where it ends.

History

The first confirmed ascent came in 1857, by a party including Henry Pittock, who later owned the Oregonian newspaper. Climbing here became a civic habit early: the Mazamas, one of America's oldest mountaineering clubs, was founded on the summit in 1894 by 155 men and 38 women who had climbed up to attend the meeting.

Routes

The South Side route via the Hogsback is the standard: a midnight start from Timberline Lodge, up the Palmer snowfield, past the sulphur-smelling fumaroles of Devil's Kitchen, then a steep finish through the Pearly Gates or the Old Chute. It is short by mountaineering standards but genuinely alpine — crampons, axe, rope and the judgement to read a bergschrund.

Permits

A free self-issued wilderness permit is required, and climbers are asked to fill in the register at the lodge. There is no fee and no quota, which is part of why the mountain is so busy.

Advice worth taking

May and early June are the season — snow has consolidated, the bergschrund is still bridged, and the fumaroles are buried. By July the route is loose rock and rockfall. Hood has a long accident record, and most of it comes down to two things: parties on the mountain too late in the day, and weather moving in from the Pacific faster than anyone expected. Be off the summit by nine in the morning.

At 1,917 m Mount Washington is modest by western standards, and it has killed more people than most peaks twice its height. The summit sits where three major storm tracks converge, and for sixty-two years it held the world record for surface wind speed: 372 km/h, measured on 12 April 1934 by observers who had to chip ice off the anemometer to keep it turning. It stands in the Presidential Range of the White Mountains.

History

Darby Field climbed it in 1642, accompanied by two Abenaki guides — one of the earliest recorded ascents anywhere in North America, almost two centuries before alpinism existed as an idea. By the 1860s the mountain had a carriage road and a cog railway, both still running, so the summit has had a building on it for longer than most American cities have had paved streets.

Routes

Tuckerman Ravine Trail is the classic: about 13 km round trip with 1,250 m of gain, steep and rocky throughout. Lion Head is the standard winter line. Ammonoosuc Ravine approaches from the west past the Lakes of the Clouds hut. None are technical in summer; all of them are serious in winter, when the Lion Head route becomes a full mountaineering outing.

Advice worth taking

The danger here is not difficulty, it is exposure above treeline in weather that arrives without warning. Summit temperatures average below freezing eight months of the year, and summer whiteouts are routine. Over 160 people have died on the mountain, most of them from hypothermia within sight of shelter. Check the Mount Washington Observatory's higher summits forecast before you leave the car, and be willing to turn back at treeline — the road and the railway will carry you up another day.

Baxter Peak, 1,606 m, is the summit of Katahdin and the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail — the point where a few hundred people a year finish a walk that began in Georgia five months earlier. The sign at the top is probably the most photographed object in the Appalachians.

History

Charles Turner Jr. made the first recorded ascent in 1804, though the Penobscot had known the mountain for far longer; Katahdin means "the greatest mountain" in their language, which makes "Mount Katahdin" a redundancy locals avoid. The surrounding park exists because Percival Baxter, governor of Maine in the 1920s, failed to persuade the legislature to buy the land and then spent decades buying it himself, piece by piece, and giving it to the state on condition that it stay wild.

Routes

The Hunt Trail — the AT's final miles — climbs boulders and iron rungs over about 16 km round trip. Abol Trail is shorter and steeper. Chimney Pond and the Saddle serve the east side. The one everybody talks about is Knife Edge: a 1.6 km arête between Pamola and Baxter Peak that narrows to a metre wide with hundreds of metres of air on both sides. It is the finest ridge walk in the eastern states and a place with no retreat once committed.

Permits and access

Baxter State Park runs on reservations: day-use parking must be booked ahead and fills instantly for summer weekends, there is a vehicle fee for out-of-state plates, and the gates open at a fixed hour. The park deliberately limits numbers — that was Baxter's condition.

Advice worth taking

The season runs from late May to mid-October. Rangers close Knife Edge in wind, and they are right to: it is no place to be caught in a gust. Start early, carry more water than feels necessary on the Hunt Trail, and if you are finishing a thru-hike, plan for the weather to decide your summit day, not the calendar.

Humphreys Peak, 3,851 m, is the highest of the San Francisco Peaks — the eroded rim of a stratovolcano that stood perhaps 1,200 m higher before it collapsed. The bowl it left is called the Inner Basin, and you walk around its edge to reach the top.

What the mountain means

Thirteen tribes hold these peaks sacred. To the Navajo this is Dook'o'oosłííd, the sacred mountain of the west, one of the four that mark the boundaries of their world. To the Hopi it is Nuva'tukya'ovi, where the kachina spirits live for half the year and from where they bring the rain. That is not folklore in the past tense: ceremonies continue, and the ski area on the lower slopes has been litigated over for decades.

Routes

Humphreys Trail from the Arizona Snowbowl parking lot is the standard: about 16 km round trip, 1,100 m of gain, switchbacks through aspen and bristlecone until the trees stop. Above the saddle the route crosses the only alpine tundra in Arizona, a few square kilometres of it, home to a groundsel that grows nowhere else on earth. Stay on the path — the plants take decades to recover from a bootprint.

Advice worth taking

The season is roughly June to October. July and August bring the monsoon, and on this exposed ridge that means lightning: afternoon storms here are both reliable and deadly, and the summit is a bad place to be any day after noon. Flagstaff sits at 2,100 m, which helps, but the last 500 m still feel like altitude to most visitors.

Wheeler Peak, 4,011 m, stands above Taos in the southern Sangre de Cristo range. There is a second Wheeler Peak in Nevada, 3,982 m — close enough in height to cause genuine confusion, and both named for the same man, George Montague Wheeler, who ran the army surveys west of the 100th meridian in the 1870s.

Routes

Two trails, and the choice matters. Williams Lake Trail from Taos Ski Valley is the short one: about 13 km round trip with 900 m of gain, steep in its upper half, done by most people in a long morning. Bull-of-the-Woods takes the ridge from the north and runs to 26 km, which buys solitude, views and an unhurried day above treeline. Neither is technical; both are entirely above the trees for the last stretch.

What you will see

Bighorn sheep were reintroduced here and now do well — a band usually loiters near the summit, unbothered by walkers. Marmots are bolder than they should be and will investigate an unattended pack. The mountain sits in a designated wilderness, so there are no permits and no facilities beyond the trailhead.

Advice worth taking

June through September, with the monsoon in July and August bringing the same afternoon lightning that governs every peak in the Southwest: be off the ridge by early afternoon. Taos Ski Valley is at 2,800 m, so a night there before the climb does most of the acclimatising for you. Snow lingers on the upper slopes into June, and microspikes are a reasonable thing to carry early in the season.

Boundary Peak, 4,007 m, is the high point of Nevada by a technicality that purists still grumble about. It is the northern end of the White Mountains, and the summit of that ridge, Montgomery Peak at 4,261 m, stands 800 metres away — on the California side of the line. Boundary rises barely 77 m above the saddle between them, which by most definitions makes it a shoulder rather than a mountain. Nevada has it anyway.

Routes

The usual approach is Trail Canyon from the east: roughly 11 km round trip with 1,200 m of gain. The lower half follows an old mining track, the upper half is scree — the loose, dispiriting kind that gives back half of every step. There is no trail in the formal sense above the saddle, just a worn line through rubble. Some parties continue to Montgomery for the view back, which adds an hour and a steep connecting ridge.

Getting there

The trailhead is off US-6 between Tonopah and Bishop, reached by several kilometres of dirt road that a normal car can usually manage. There are no permits, no fees and no services of any kind. The nearest fuel can be fifty kilometres away, which is worth checking rather than assuming.

Advice worth taking

July to September. There is no water on the route and no shade whatsoever, and the desert sun at 4,000 m is a different proposition from the same sun at the car. Carry four litres. Wind is the other constant — this ridge catches everything coming across the Sierra, and the saddle can be unpleasant enough to turn people around on an otherwise perfect day.

Maunakea is 4,207 m above sea level and 10,210 m above its own base on the ocean floor, which makes it the tallest mountain on earth by that measure — taller than Everest by well over a kilometre. It is also the only place in the tropics where you can be caught in a blizzard, and people do ski here.

A sacred summit

In Hawaiian tradition this is the realm of Poliʻahu, the snow goddess, and the piko — the navel — connecting the islands to the sky. The visitor centre asks people not to walk onto the true summit cone out of respect, and most do not. Thirteen observatories stand just below it, and the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope brought years of protest and blockades on the access road from 2014 onward. Arriving as a visitor means arriving in the middle of a live argument, and it is worth knowing that before you go.

Getting there

A paved road climbs to the visitor station at 2,800 m; above that it is gravel and steep, and rental agreements almost universally require four-wheel drive and often forbid the road outright. Walking up from the visitor station is legal and brutal: 10 km with 1,400 m of gain, in thin air, with no shade and no water.

Advice worth taking

The altitude is the real hazard, because the approach is so fast — people drive from sea level to 4,200 m in two hours and get altitude sickness in a parked car. Stop at the visitor station for at least half an hour. Do not go up with a scuba dive in the last day. Sunset from the summit is extraordinary; the rule is to be below 2,800 m within half an hour of dark, when the road and the thin air stop being forgiving.

Guadalupe Peak, 2,667 m, is the top of a fossil reef. The Guadalupe Mountains are what remains of the Capitan Reef, built by sponges and algae in a tropical sea some 265 million years ago, buried, and then lifted and exposed. You are walking up a seabed.

The pyramid on top

The summit carries a stainless steel pyramid placed by American Airlines in 1958, marking the centenary of the Butterfield Overland Mail, whose stagecoaches passed below on the run between St Louis and San Francisco. El Capitan, the sheer prow just south, was the landmark drivers steered by for days across the flats.

Routes

One trail, well built and relentless: 13 km round trip with 900 m of gain, starting from the Pine Springs campground. The first kilometre and a half is the steepest part of the whole route, which catches people out. There is a bridge over a gully, a shaded stretch of pine and Douglas fir that feels impossible in this landscape, and then an open ridge to the top.

Advice worth taking

Spring and autumn are the seasons; summer afternoons on bare rock in west Texas are punishing. Wind is the park's signature — gusts over 100 km/h are routine in spring, and rangers will close the trail when it gets serious. Carry at least three litres, because there is no water on the route and the park sells none at the trailhead. Entry is by park fee; there is no climbing permit, and backcountry camping needs one booked in advance.

Mount Marcy, 1,629 m, is the high point of the Adirondacks and the centre of the High Peaks region. The Mohawk name is Tahawus, usually translated as cloud-splitter, which suits it better than the surveyor's honorific it ended up with.

History

Ebenezer Emmons led the first recorded ascent in 1837 and named the peak for William Marcy, then governor. Just below the summit lies Lake Tear of the Clouds, a pond the size of a tennis court that is the highest source of the Hudson. And on 13 September 1901 Theodore Roosevelt was descending from this summit when a runner caught him with the news that McKinley was dying; he rode through the night and was sworn in as president the next day.

Routes

The Van Hoevenberg Trail from Adirondak Loj is the standard: about 24 km round trip with 1,000 m of gain, a long day rather than a hard one. Routes from Upper Works to the south are longer and much quieter. The final stretch crosses bare rock with alpine vegetation clinging to it — summit stewards are often posted there in season, asking walkers to stay on the stone, because the plants on this one small patch exist nowhere else in the state.

Advice worth taking

Marcy is one of the Adirondack 46, and the pursuit of all forty-six draws enough traffic that the busiest trailheads now require parking reservations in summer. Mud season, roughly April to early June, is when the trails are most fragile and most unpleasant. Winter ascents are popular and serious: the summit is fully exposed, and the same weather that makes Mount Washington dangerous reaches here too.

Mount Mitchell, 2,037 m, is the highest point anywhere east of the Mississippi. It stands in the Black Mountains, a short spur off the Blue Ridge, and a road runs almost to the top — the walk from the car park takes five minutes.

A measurement worth dying for

Elisha Mitchell, a professor at the University of North Carolina, measured these peaks in the 1830s and argued this one was the highest in the east. Thomas Clingman, a former student turned congressman, disputed it and claimed the honour for a different summit. In 1857 Mitchell returned to re-verify his readings, fell at a waterfall on the mountain's flank and drowned. He is buried on the summit. The measurement was his; the peak carries his name, and the summit Clingman championed carries Clingman's — see Clingmans Dome below.

What you will find

An observation deck, a small museum, a restaurant in season, and a forest that is visibly dying. The Fraser firs here were hit first by the balsam woolly adelgid, an introduced insect, and then by decades of acid deposition from coal plants upwind. Standing grey snags cover whole slopes. It is one of the clearest views of ecological damage anywhere in the region, and the park does not hide it.

Advice worth taking

For a proper day out, walk up instead: the Old Mitchell Trail from the state park office, or the long haul up the Black Mountain Crest Trail from Bowlens Creek — 18 km one way with over 1,300 m of gain, one of the hardest trails in the state. The summit is 10 °C cooler than Asheville and gets 2,000 mm of rain a year, so bring a layer even in July. The Blue Ridge Parkway closes in ice, which can mean no vehicle access for days in winter.

Clingmans Dome, 2,025 m, is the highest point in Tennessee, the highest in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and the highest on the entire Appalachian Trail. In 2024 it was officially renamed Kuwohi, the Cherokee name meaning roughly "mulberry place" — restored at the request of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, for whom the mountain is a place of refuge in their accounts of the Trail of Tears.

The other half of a feud

Thomas Clingman was the congressman who spent years arguing that this summit, not Mount Mitchell, was the highest in the east. He was wrong by twelve metres, and the dispute cost his opponent his life. The name stuck for over a century anyway.

Getting there

A paved road climbs to a car park at 1,965 m, and from there a steep half-mile ramp leads to a concrete observation tower built in 1959 — a spiral that looks like nothing else in the park. The road closes from 1 December to 31 March, when the only way up is on foot or skis from Newfound Gap, which turns a tourist stop into a serious winter outing.

What to expect

Clouds, most likely: the summit is in fog around two days in three, and annual rainfall exceeds 2,000 mm, which is why this is temperate rainforest. The spruce-fir forest here is dying from the same adelgid that struck Mount Mitchell, and the grey trunks are the first thing most visitors photograph. Go at dawn for the clearest air, and expect it to be 10–12 °C colder than Gatlinburg below.

At 2,207 m this is the highest point in the United States east of the Rockies — higher than anything in the Appalachians, the Ozarks or the Great Plains, and it sits in the middle of the Black Hills, an island of granite in a sea of prairie.

Two names

The catalogue still lists it as Harney Peak, after a general whose reputation among the Lakota rests on the massacre at Blue Water Creek in 1855. In 2016 the federal board renamed it Black Elk Peak, for Hehaka Sapa — Black Elk, the Oglala Lakota holy man who as a nine-year-old boy had a vision here that he recounted sixty years later in a book that has never gone out of print. To the Lakota the summit is one of the Six Grandfathers, and it remains a place of ceremony.

The walk

Trail #9 from Sylvan Lake is the standard: about 11 km round trip with 450 m of gain, well graded, busy on summer weekends. The top is crowned by a stone fire lookout built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1938, with a staircase cut into the rock leading to it. On a clear day the view takes in four states.

Advice worth taking

Late spring through autumn; the trail holds ice well into April. Mount Rushmore is twenty minutes away and the Crazy Horse Memorial about the same, which makes this a crowded corner of the state in July — start early or walk the quieter approach from Willow Creek. Afternoon thunderstorms build fast over the Hills, and the lookout is the worst place to wait one out.

Mount Rogers, 1,744 m, is the high point of Virginia and one of the few summits on this list with no view at all — the top is buried in a dense stand of red spruce and Fraser fir, a fragment of boreal forest stranded here since the last ice age. People come anyway, and mostly for what is on the way.

The ponies

The approach crosses Grayson Highlands, open balds grazed by a herd of feral ponies introduced in the 1970s to keep the meadows from growing over. They are genuinely wild, entirely unbothered by walkers, and will put their nose in an open pack within seconds. Feeding them is prohibited and bad for them; photographing them is why half the traffic on this trail exists.

Routes

From Massie Gap it is about 14 km round trip, following the Appalachian Trail along the crest before a short spur to the wooded summit. Elk Garden from the west is a shorter approach. The Appalachian crest here is open and rocky, closer to Scotland than to the rest of the southern mountains.

History and advice

The mountain honours William Barton Rogers, Virginia's first state geologist, who went on to found MIT. The season is year-round, though winter brings serious wind on the balds. Water is scarce on the ridge, the weather turns quickly, and the one guarantee is that the actual summit will be an anticlimax — bring your enthusiasm for the meadows instead.

Panorama Point, 1,655 m, is not a summit in any sense a climber would accept. It is a slight rise on a bison ranch where the High Plains tilt imperceptibly up toward Colorado, marked by a limestone post because otherwise nobody could tell. It is also higher than any point in twenty-four other states.

Getting there

The point sits on private land in the far south-western corner of the state, on the High Point Bison Ranch. The owners allow access, ask for three dollars in an honesty box at the gate, and keep a visitor register. A normal car reaches the marker on dry gravel roads; after rain the last stretch turns to gumbo and will strand you. The bison are real, loose, and not to be approached — they weigh a tonne and can outrun a horse.

What is actually here

The tri-state corner where Nebraska, Colorado and Wyoming meet is a short drive away, which is the usual reason people combine the two. The view is exactly what the name promises: 360 degrees of short-grass prairie, with the Front Range sometimes visible as a grey line on the western horizon.

Advice worth taking

Any season with a dry road, which in practice means May to October. There is no shade, no water and no phone signal worth relying on, and the nearest fuel is in Pine Bluffs or Kimball. Sign the book — the ranch keeps the registers, and highpointers who come back years later enjoy finding their own handwriting.

Black Mesa, 1,516 m, is the top of a lava flow that spilled east out of New Mexico about five million years ago and stopped here, in the Oklahoma panhandle. The mesa is flat, black-rimmed basalt, and the high point is a granite obelisk in the middle of it listing the distances to the state lines — Colorado 1,299 feet away, New Mexico 3.1 miles.

What is out here

This is the emptiest corner of the state and the least like the rest of it: juniper, cholla, pronghorn and more sunshine than anywhere else in Oklahoma. The canyons below the mesa hold dinosaur trackways — Apatosaurus prints in the creek beds, a few of them still visible where the water has scoured the rock clean. The nature preserve protects the mesa itself, and the state park sits four miles away at the campground.

The walk

About 13 km round trip with 180 m of gain, almost all of it in one steep pull up the side of the mesa; the rest is a flat walk across the top. There is no shade and no water. Rattlesnakes are common enough that watching where you put your feet is not optional advice.

Advice worth taking

Spring and autumn. Summer here routinely passes 38 °C on exposed basalt, and winter brings wind with nothing to break it. Go early, carry three litres, and stay for the night sky — this is one of the darkest places in the country, far enough from any city that the Milky Way casts a shadow.

Spruce Knob, 1,482 m, is the high point of West Virginia and of the Allegheny Mountains. What people remember is the trees: the red spruce on the summit grow branches on one side only, flagged east by a wind that never stops coming over the rim.

What makes it strange

The knob sits on the Allegheny Front, the abrupt edge where the plateau drops away eastward. Weather piles up against it, and the summit gets both the rainfall of a rainforest and the exposure of a much higher mountain. The result is a boreal island — spruce, mountain ash, bog plants and a kind of rock-strewn heath that belongs a thousand kilometres north.

Getting there

A paved forest road climbs to a car park a few hundred metres below the top, and a half-mile loop with an observation tower finishes the job. For an actual walk, the Huckleberry Trail runs the ridge for 16 km, and the Spruce Knob Lake area below has a network worth a full day. Seneca Rocks, the rock-climbing centre of the eastern states, is twenty minutes down the valley.

Advice worth taking

The road is unploughed in winter and the gate closes, which turns an easy drive into a long ski or snowshoe. Summer fog is frequent — the tower is often inside a cloud. There is no fee and no permit, the campground nearby is first-come, and the night sky here is among the darkest in the eastern half of the country.

Brasstown Bald, 1,458 m, is the high point of Georgia and carries a glass-walled observation deck with a genuine 360-degree view — on a clear winter day you can see four states and, people claim, the towers of Atlanta ninety kilometres south.

The name, twice mistranslated

The Cherokee called the mountain Itse'yĭ, a word for a place of new green growth. Early settlers heard it as Untsaiyĭ, which means brass, and the mistranslation stuck to the whole area. "Bald" is the southern Appalachian term for a summit that carries meadow instead of forest for reasons nobody has fully settled — grazing, fire, climate, or all three.

Getting there

A road climbs to a car park at 1,400 m, and from there it is a steep paved path of about 800 m to the summit, or a shuttle in season for those who would rather not. Walkers can take the Arkaquah Trail from Track Rock Gap — 9 km one way along the ridge, with far more to it than the view from the car.

Advice worth taking

Open roughly late March to early December; the road closes in ice and the summit holds snow when the valleys are green. Autumn colour here is a regional event and the car park fills by nine in the morning on October weekends. There is a small entrance fee, and the visitor centre's museum is better than it has any need to be.

Mount Mansfield, 1,340 m, is the high point of Vermont and the most anatomical mountain in the country. Seen from the east its ridge forms a face lying back against the sky, and the features have been named accordingly for two centuries: the Forehead, the Nose, the Chin and the Adam's Apple. The summit is the Chin.

Tundra on a small mountain

About eighty hectares of the ridge carry arctic-alpine tundra — mountain cranberry, bigelow sedge, diapensia — surviving here since the glaciers left and found nowhere else in the state at this scale. It is fragile enough that volunteer caretakers sit on the ridge all summer asking people to keep to the bare rock. One bootprint can take decades to grow back.

Routes

The Long Trail, the oldest long-distance footpath in the country and the model for the Appalachian Trail, runs along the crest. Up from the west, the Sunset Ridge Trail from Underhill is the classic: 11 km round trip, open above treeline for the last stretch. Hell Brook from the east is short, brutal and loved by a certain kind of walker. The Toll Road and the gondola from Stowe will also put you on the ridge, which is how most visitors arrive.

Advice worth taking

Summer and autumn; in winter this is a ski mountain with a serious backcountry scene. The ridge is exposed and the weather turns without warning, as on every summit in New England. The transmitter towers on the Nose are not the summit — walk north along the ridge to reach the Chin.

Mount Sunflower, 1,230 m, is the high point of Kansas and the best joke on this list. There is no mountain. The plains tilt steadily upward from the Missouri river to the Colorado line, and this is simply where they stop — a pasture a kilometre from the border, higher than anything in twenty states.

What is there

The Harold family, who own the land, have kept it open to visitors for decades and built the monument themselves: a sunflower welded out of horseshoes and railroad spikes, a mailbox with a visitor register, a picnic table and a plaque reading "On this site in 1897 nothing happened." There is no fee and no gate attendant, only a cattle guard and the request to close what you open.

Getting there

Gravel roads from Weskan, about forty minutes of them, all passable to a normal car in dry weather. The drive is the experience: section-line roads running dead straight to the horizon, grain elevators standing in for mountains, and almost no traffic.

A note on flatness

The old line about Kansas being flatter than a pancake came from a 2003 joke paper that measured a pancake and was technically correct. In fact the state rises some 900 m from east to west, which is roughly the height gain of walking up Guadalupe Peak — you just do it over 600 km and in a car, without ever noticing.

Advice worth taking

Any season, any weather that leaves the roads dry. Bring something to sign the book with. Sunrise and sunset out here are the reason to time the visit, and the night sky is as good as the one over Black Mesa three hundred kilometres south.

Black Mountain, 1,259 m, is the high point of Kentucky and sits on top of one of the richest coal seams in North America. That is not background detail — it is the whole story of the place.

The summit that was nearly mined

By the 1990s the mountain was owned by coal companies and scheduled for logging and surface mining up to and across the top. A coalition of local residents, students from the town of Lynch below, and environmental groups fought it through the decade, and in 1999 a deal protected roughly 1,850 acres of the summit. The slopes below were not included, and from the top you can see what the alternative looked like: benched hillsides where mountaintop removal took the ridgelines off.

Getting there

A gravel road climbs to communication towers near the summit. The true high point is a short walk away, marked by a sign and a register box. Access depends on the landowner, and the arrangement has shifted over the years — check locally before driving up rather than assuming.

What else is here

Lynch was built by US Steel in 1917 as a company town and was once the largest coal camp in the world. Portal 31, the mine that drove it, is now an underground museum where retired miners guide visitors. For anyone interested in why these mountains look the way they do, it explains more than the view does.

Advice worth taking

Spring through autumn; the road is rough in winter. Fog is constant on the ridge, and the best light is early. Combine it with the Appalachian drives around Cumberland Gap, an hour west.

Mount Greylock, 1,063 m, is the high point of Massachusetts and the most literary mountain in the country. Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick in a farmhouse with Greylock filling the study window, and he dedicated his next novel to it; the long whale-backed profile is not a coincidence readers invented. Thoreau walked up in 1844, slept on the summit under a plank, and wrote about waking above a sea of cloud.

What stands on top

The Veterans War Memorial Tower, a granite lighthouse built in 1932 and lit at night, visible for over a hundred kilometres. Beside it, Bascom Lodge, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, still serves meals and rents bunks in season. The reservation around it was the first state park in Massachusetts, created in 1898 after loggers had stripped the slopes bare.

Routes

The Appalachian Trail crosses the summit, and thru-hikers climb it as the state's one real ascent. From Adams, the Cheshire Harbor Trail is the steady way up, about 11 km round trip. The Hopper Trail from Williamstown is steeper and prettier. A paved road runs to the top from both north and south, so you will share the summit with people who drove.

Advice worth taking

The road is closed from November to May, which turns Greylock into a quiet winter mountain with snowshoe and ski traffic only. Autumn is spectacular and crowded. The old-growth spruce on the upper slopes is one of the few boreal patches left in southern New England, and the summit is often ten degrees colder than the valley.

Sassafras Mountain, 1,087 m, is the high point of South Carolina and sits exactly on the state line — the observation platform opened in 2019 has a strip across it marking the border, so you can stand with one foot in each state. The view takes in the Jocassee Gorges, a landscape National Geographic once put on a list of the world's last great places.

Before the platform

For decades the summit was a gravel car park with a fire tower that had been dismantled, and the trees had grown high enough to block the view entirely. Highpointers arrived, found nothing to look at, signed the register and left. The new deck changed that: 360 degrees, with the Blue Ridge escarpment falling away north and the Piedmont stretching south.

Routes

A paved road reaches the car park, and the summit is a short walk. The Foothills Trail, which runs 124 km across the Blue Ridge foothills from Oconee to Table Rock, crosses here — the stretch down to Laurel Valley is the best day walk in the state. The Palmetto Trail links in as well.

Advice worth taking

Open year-round, free, with the road occasionally closed by ice. Spring brings mountain laurel and rhododendron through the gorges below; October is the colour, and the car park fills accordingly. Bring a wind layer — the platform is exposed and the ridge channels everything that comes over it.

White Butte, 1,069 m, is the high point of North Dakota, and for years the catalogue got it wrong — a neighbouring butte carries a similar height and the flag sat on that one instead. White Butte is the right answer, and it stands in the badlands of the south-west, a pale cone of soft clay and sandstone above short-grass prairie.

Private land, open gate

The butte is on a working ranch. The family who own it allow access for a fee — twenty dollars, left in a box at the gate — and ask that visitors sign in and stay on the track. That arrangement has held for decades and is worth not abusing: several state high points have been closed to the public by owners who got tired of the traffic.

The walk

About 5 km round trip with 150 m of gain, following a two-track across pasture and then a path up the clay slope. It is easy in dry weather and genuinely unpleasant after rain, when badlands clay turns to the kind of gumbo that doubles the weight of your boots with every step. The summit has a register and a view across the Little Missouri grasslands.

Advice worth taking

May to October, and check the forecast rather than the calendar — this is country where a thunderstorm will strand a car on a dirt road for a day. Rattlesnakes are present. Theodore Roosevelt National Park is an hour north and makes the obvious pairing: the badlands there are the same formation, cut deeper.

Hoye-Crest, 1,027 m, is the high point of Maryland and a geographical oddity: it is not a summit at all, but the highest point on the Maryland side of Backbone Mountain, whose actual top is a few hundred metres away in West Virginia. The state line runs across the slope, and Maryland's high point is wherever that line crosses the contour.

Getting there

The trail starts from US-219 in West Virginia, which means most people reach Maryland's high point by parking in another state and walking uphill into it. It is about 3 km round trip with 230 m of gain, steep in places, following an old logging road and then a marked path. At the top there is a sign, a register box and, traditionally, a stack of certificates left for visitors to take.

What it is like

Hardwood forest the whole way, with a modest clearing at the crest and a view east over the Potomac headwaters. The mountain is named Backbone for the long ridge it forms; Hoye-Crest honours Captain Charles Hoye, a local historian. The surrounding land belongs to a timber company that has long tolerated walkers.

Advice worth taking

Any season, though the access road is high and gets snow. The walk takes an hour, which makes this one of the easier high points to combine with others — Spruce Knob in West Virginia and Mount Davis in Pennsylvania are both within a two-hour drive, and highpointers often do all three in a day.

Mount Davis, 979 m, is the high point of Pennsylvania — a broad wooded crest rather than a peak, topped by a steel observation tower that lifts you just above the canopy. It is named for John Davis, a Civil War veteran, surveyor and naturalist who settled here and spent his later years cataloguing the local flora.

Ice-age ground

The summit's strangest feature is underfoot. The flat ground around the tower is covered in stone rings and stripes — rocks sorted into patterns by repeated freezing and thawing when this ridge sat just south of the ice sheet, twenty thousand years ago. The same patterns occur in the Arctic today. In the Appalachians they are rare enough that the area is a registered natural landmark, and they are easy to walk across without noticing.

Getting there

A road runs to a picnic area a few minutes from the tower. For a proper visit there are about 23 km of trails through the surrounding state forest, and the High Point Trail links the tower to the picnic ground. Nothing here is steep; the pleasure is in the forest and the quiet.

A note on the name

Mount Davis is the high point of a long ridge whose historical name is one the state has been debating for years, and which many maps have now dropped. If you see older material referring to the ridge by a different name, that is why.

Advice worth taking

Open year-round; the road closes in heavy snow, when the trails become cross-country skiing. Autumn is the season everyone comes for. Combine with Hoye-Crest, an hour and a half south.

High Point, 551 m, is exactly what its name says: the highest ground in New Jersey, on the Kittatinny Ridge in the state's far north-west corner. It is marked by something no other state high point has — a 67-metre obelisk of New Hampshire granite and local quartzite, built in 1930 as a memorial to the state's war dead and visible from three states.

The monument

Colonel Anthony Kuser and his wife donated the land and paid for the tower, modelled loosely on the Washington Monument. You can climb the internal stairs when it is open, and from the top the view takes in the Pocono plateau in Pennsylvania, the Catskills in New York and the Wallkill valley below. On a clear day it is one of the broadest views in the mid-Atlantic.

Routes

A road climbs to the monument car park, so the walk is a few minutes. Walkers have better options: the Appalachian Trail runs along the ridge through the park, and the Monument Trail makes a 6 km loop past Lake Marcia, cedar swamp and the ridge's open rock. The Dryden Kuser Natural Area protects an Atlantic white cedar bog at an altitude where it has no business existing.

Advice worth taking

The park is open year-round; the monument itself opens seasonally, so check before counting on the stairs. Autumn is the obvious time. Winter brings cross-country skiing on the park's trail network, and the ridge holds snow longer than the valleys either side.

Jerimoth Hill, 256 m, is the high point of Rhode Island, a rock in the woods about a hundred metres from a road. It is also, for a generation of highpointers, the most notorious summit in the country — for years it was the hardest of the fifty to reach, and the difficulty had nothing to do with the terrain.

The feud

The high point sits just off a driveway, and the landowner through the 1980s and 1990s objected to the traffic. Visitors were met with shouted warnings, called in to the police, and in the retellings that circulated among highpointers, worse. Access narrowed to a handful of permitted days a year, publicised in advance; people drove across the country to use them. The standoff became the subject of magazine articles and at least one lawsuit threat, and finished only when the property changed hands in the mid-2000s. The new owners, and Brown University next door, opened the way.

Visiting now

There is a small pull-off on Route 101, a short marked path, and a sign at the rock. The whole thing takes ten minutes. A plaque thanks visitors for respecting the neighbours — a line that reads differently once you know the history.

Advice worth taking

Any season, any weather. Brown University's Ladd Observatory group uses the dark site next door, which is why the hill has an astronomical footnote as well. Combine it with Mount Greylock and Connecticut's Bear Mountain: three state high points inside a comfortable day's driving.

Cheaha Mountain, 733 m, is the high point of Alabama and the southern end of the Appalachian chain — the last high ground before the mountains sink into the coastal plain. The name comes from the Muscogee word chaha, meaning high.

What stands there

Cheaha State Park is the oldest in Alabama, laid out in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, and most of what you see is their work: the stone Bunker Tower on the summit, the lodge, the trail shelters, all built from local quartzite by young men on relief wages. The tower is open and the view runs across the Talladega National Forest in every direction.

Routes

You can drive to within a hundred metres of the top, which is how most visitors arrive. Walkers have the Pinhoti Trail — 540 km across Alabama and Georgia, now linked to the Appalachian Trail, so that a thru-hiker can start here and finish in Maine. The Bald Rock boardwalk is short, accessible and ends at an overlook that is the best thing in the park.

Advice worth taking

Year-round. Spring and autumn are the seasons; summer is humid and hazy, which flattens the view. There is a park entrance fee, a campground and a lodge with rooms. Ice storms occasionally close the summit road, and the park sits high enough to hold snow when Birmingham, an hour west, sees none.

Signal Hill, 837 m, is the high point of Arkansas — a low rise on top of Mount Magazine, a flat-topped mesa standing alone above the Arkansas River valley between the Ozarks and the Ouachitas. The mountain is the attraction; the high point is a marker in the woods a kilometre from the lodge.

Butterflies and bears

Mount Magazine records 94 species of butterfly, more than anywhere else in the state, and the park leans into it with an annual festival. Black bears are common on the slopes — Arkansas rebuilt its population from a near-total collapse, and these mountains were where the reintroduced animals took hold. Peregrine falcons nest on the bluffs.

What people come for

Mostly not the summit. The mesa's southern rim is a line of sandstone bluffs 300 m above the valley, used for rock climbing, rappelling and hang-gliding — the launch ramp is one of the best known in the central states. Cameron Bluff overlook drive runs along the edge. The high point walk from the lodge is 2 km return through oak forest, pleasant and entirely viewless.

Advice worth taking

Spring for the flowers and autumn for the colour; summer is hot but the mesa runs several degrees cooler than the valley. The lodge books out on weekends. Combine with Black Mesa in Oklahoma only if you like driving — it is nine hours west, and the contrast between the two is the point.

Bear Mountain, 708 m, is the highest summit in Connecticut — but not the highest ground in the state. That distinction belongs to a spot on the south slope of Mount Frissell, 725 m, whose summit stands in Massachusetts. Connecticut therefore has a high point that is not a peak and a high peak that is not the high point, which is the sort of thing highpointers find delightful and everyone else finds confusing.

The cairn

On top sits a large stone pyramid, built in 1885 by Owen Travis, a local mason, with a carved inscription declaring this "the highest ground in Connecticut" — wrong, as it turned out, but it has been standing for 140 years and nobody is inclined to correct it. The pile has been rebuilt more than once after collapses.

Routes

From Route 41 near Salisbury, the Undermountain Trail climbs to the Appalachian Trail and follows it north to the summit: about 10 km round trip with 450 m of gain, steep and rocky at the top. The open ledges give a long view north into Massachusetts. Those collecting high points usually add Mount Frissell's south slope on the same day, 3 km west along the ridge.

Advice worth taking

Year-round, with ice making the summit rocks genuinely dangerous in winter. Autumn here is as good as New England gets. The trailhead parking is small and fills early on October weekends.

Eagle Mountain, 701 m, is the high point of Minnesota and sits 24 km from Lake Superior, whose surface is at 183 m — the largest relief in the state, and all of it inside one wilderness.

Where it is

The summit lies in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a million acres of lakes and portages along the Canadian border where motors are banned and travel is by paddle or on foot. A self-issued permit from the trailhead box is required for a day walk, and quota permits apply for overnights in season. The rules are strict and well enforced; this is one of the most carefully protected landscapes in the country.

The walk

About 11 km round trip, following a rocky, root-laced path past Whale Lake. It is wetter than the distance suggests — boardwalks cross the worst of the bog, and in a normal June the rest is mud. The last stretch climbs onto open granite with a plaque, and the view takes in lakes in every direction and not a single building.

Advice worth taking

Late June to September, or winter on snowshoes. Mosquitoes and black flies in June and July are not an exaggeration — head nets are normal equipment. Moose are present, wolves pass through, and bears will investigate a poorly hung food bag. Carry water filtration rather than weight: the lakes are everywhere.

Mount Arvon, 601 m, is the high point of Michigan, in the Huron Mountains of the Upper Peninsula — and it only became the high point in 1982.

Thirty centimetres

For most of a century the title belonged to Mount Curwood, a few kilometres west. Then a resurvey with better instruments found that Arvon beat it by about 30 cm. Michigan's high point moved, the signs were rewritten, and Curwood kept a certain grudging local loyalty. It is the smallest margin by which any state high point has changed hands.

Getting there

This is the hard part. The summit is reached by a network of unsigned logging roads out of L'Anse, and the route has defeated more visitors than the walking ever did. Follow the local directions carefully, bring a GPS track, and do not attempt it in a low car — the last stretch is rough two-track. From the small parking area the summit is a five-minute walk through maple forest to a sign, a bench and a mailbox register.

What it is like

Forest, in every direction, with a small clearing looking north toward Lake Superior ten kilometres away. The name comes from Arvon in Wales, after the slate quarrymen who settled here. Timber companies own most of the surrounding land and permit public access.

Advice worth taking

June to October; the roads are not ploughed and snowmobiles take over in winter. Autumn colour in the Upper Peninsula peaks in early October. Black flies are at their worst in June, and cell coverage on the approach is effectively nil.

Timms Hill, 595 m, is the high point of Wisconsin — a glacial moraine in the north woods, forested to the top, with a wooden observation tower that lifts you just above the canopy for a view of lakes and more trees.

What it is

Everything here was left by ice. The hill is a kame, a mound of sand and gravel dumped by meltwater at the edge of the retreating glacier about 15,000 years ago, and the surrounding pocked landscape of small lakes and bogs is the same story in reverse. The hill is named for Timm, a nineteenth-century logger who ran a camp at the lake below.

Getting there

A county park road reaches a car park, from which a short trail and a stairway climb to the tower in about ten minutes. The Timms Hill National Trail runs 16 km from here to the Ice Age National Scenic Trail — the thousand-mile route that follows the entire terminal moraine of the last glaciation across the state, which is the real walking on offer in this part of Wisconsin.

Advice worth taking

The park is open from spring to autumn and the road is gated in winter, when skiers and snowshoers use the trails. The tower is the point: without climbing it you see nothing but forest. October brings the maples, and the drive in from Medford through the Chequamegon forest is worth as much as the hill.

Taum Sauk Mountain, 538 m, is the high point of Missouri and stands on some of the oldest exposed rock in North America — rhyolite erupted about 1.5 billion years ago, when the St. Francois Mountains were volcanoes in a shallow sea. What is left is the worn-down core, ancient enough that the Appalachians are young by comparison.

The reservoir that burst

On 14 December 2005 the upper reservoir of the Taum Sauk pumped-storage plant, sitting on the ridge nearby, overtopped and failed. Around five million cubic metres of water went down the mountain in minutes, stripping the slope to bedrock and sweeping through Johnson's Shut-Ins State Park below. The park superintendent's house was carried away with his family inside; they survived. The park reopened years later, rebuilt, and the scar on the hillside is still clearly visible.

Routes

A road reaches a car park, and the high point is 400 m along a paved path. The walk worth doing is the 5 km loop to Mina Sauk Falls, the tallest waterfall in Missouri at 40 m, which runs hard in spring and vanishes by August. The Ozark Trail continues south from there through some of the roughest country in the state.

Advice worth taking

Spring for the falls and the wildflowers on the glades, autumn for colour. The last kilometres of road are steep and narrow. Ticks are serious here from April onward, and the open rhyolite glades hold heat in summer.

Charles Mound, 374 m, is the high point of Illinois, and it is open to visitors on exactly four weekends a year.

The four weekends

The mound stands on private farmland in the state's north-western corner. The family who own it have for years allowed access on the first weekend of June, July, August and September — Friday through Sunday, daylight hours, no fee, no reservation. Outside those dates the driveway is closed and the request is simply to respect it. Highpointers plan whole trips around the calendar, and the arrangement has survived because people have mostly behaved.

What is there

A 1.5 km walk up the farm driveway to a marker and a register near the house, through fields with a long view over the hills. The area is the Driftless — the part of the upper Midwest that the glaciers flowed around rather than over, leaving ridges and deep valleys where Illinois is otherwise flat. It looks nothing like the rest of the state.

Advice worth taking

Check the dates before driving: they have shifted occasionally, and arriving on a closed weekend means a locked gate and nothing to do about it. Galena, half an hour south, is the obvious base — a nineteenth-century lead-mining town where Ulysses Grant lived. Combine with Hawkeye Point in Iowa and Timms Hill in Wisconsin: three state high points inside a long day.