My dad and I walked across the Grandfather Mountain bridge, which he said he wasn’t going across. No way. I’m not going.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” I told him. I mean it’s just the highest foot bridge in America so what could go wrong.
When he was a kid, his dad took him to the swinging bridge on Lookout Mountain. This bridge in Tennessee takes visitors out to Lover’s Leap. When my dad walked out toward the middle of it, his dad started laughing with a certain crazy gleam in his eyes.
The bridge began to shake and to swing wildly with the two of them on it. My dad clutched the ropes and turned his head toward his father, the cause of his terror. He felt like crying. He hasn’t forgotten this. He’s never looked at swinging bridges the same since.
The Hurricane Winds at the Mile-High Swinging Bridge
The Grandfather Mountain bridge doesn’t really swing, though. At least not that much. It’s all steel, with steel cables anchored to massive rock features down below. The cables of course provide stability, because the mountain experiences regular violent gusts. They howl up there at the mountain’s high points.
Wind gusts have exceeded 200 miles an hour up there (Jan. 25, 2006, to be exact)–at least that’s the rumor.
But this late February day in 2024, the wind and the weather were both mild, even springish, when he finally agreed to cross with me, mostly, I think, because he wanted to be sure I didn’t die alone.
I’m happy to report that we both survived, and even enjoyed, that experience, even after I freaked him out a bit by seeming to creep too close to a rock edge on the other side–a habit that’s freaked him out since my teenage days when he would join me on climbing expeditions and I’d peer over the edge of cliffs.
“Buddy,” he’d say. “PLEASE don’t do that.”
And now, decades later, he said the same thing. Nostalgia can be a powerful motivator I guess.
What’s So Special About Grandfather Mountain?
Long before a mile-high swinging bridge was constructed in 1952 to span the 228-foot wide. Before visitors could walk across the 80-foot deep chasm at 5,305 feet above sea level. Before a road was constructed for visitors to wind there way up. The 5,946-foot prominence of Grandfather Mountain was astounding native people and settlers living near and along the Blue Ridge escarpment in North Carolina’s High Country.
Native tribes named it Tanawha, which has been translated to mean “fabulous hawk.” One wonders, though, if the word “fabulous” is really what they thought as they stood in the shadow of this mountain. It’s doubtful.
Calling Grandfather a hawk, though, makes sense when you see it from Rough Ridge on a day when white fog stretches across it just below the summit. It looks like it could be flying. If you see the same mountain from far off, from, say, the outcroppings in Blowing Rock, though, you see what the early white settlers saw–the profile of a bearded old man lying across the sky.
During certain sunsets, it actually looks like a scene from Mordor.
If you truly want to see the mountain and understand why it’s such a unique experience in western North Carolina, you need to hike it.