Piedmont Triad International

At 5,946 feet, Grandfather Mountain is the highest peak on the eastern escarpment of the Blue Ridge — a craggy, rugged summit named for the profile of an old man's face that early settlers saw in its ridgeline. It's a UNESCO biosphere reserve with 16 distinct ecological zones stacked up its slopes. The famous draw is the Mile High Swinging Bridge: a 228-foot suspension footbridge built in 1952, spanning a chasm at exactly 5,280 feet of elevation, swaying over a thousand-foot drop. Just below, the Blue Ridge Parkway curves around the mountain on the Linn Cove Viaduct, an S-shaped elevated roadway hung off the slope — the last piece of the entire parkway to be completed, in 1987.

A 215-foot limestone arch — twenty stories tall — spanning a gorge cut by little Cedar Creek, so massive that US Route 11 runs across the top and most drivers never realize they're crossing it. For two centuries it was as famous as Niagara, billed as one of the "Seven Natural Wonders of the World." Thomas Jefferson loved it so much he bought it from King George III in 1774 — 157 acres including the bridge — and built a cabin to host visitors; he called it "the most sublime of Nature's works." Legend (unproven but enduring) says a young George Washington surveyed it and carved his initials into the rock wall. It's now a Virginia state park in the Shenandoah Valley.

One of the wildest, most rugged places in the eastern United States — a 12-mile-long, 2,000-foot-deep chasm where the Linville River saws down through quartzite into the Pisgah National Forest. It's one of only a few federally designated wilderness areas in the East, so rugged it was never logged; the gorge walls are cliffs and crags (Table Rock, Hawksbill, the Chimneys) prized by climbers, and the terrain is steep enough that hikers regularly need rescue. At the head of the gorge, Linville Falls drops in tiered cascades about 90 feet into the canyon mouth. The surrounding Pisgah forest hides waterfalls in nearly every hollow.

The Greenbrier began as a sulphur springs spa in 1778 and grew over 250 years into one of America's grand resorts. The central wing, completed 1913 to a design by Frederick Julius Sterner, is six stories tall, 250 rooms, and topped by an iron-and-glass dome painted green. The 11,000-acre property includes three championship golf courses — the Old White (1913, by Charles B. Macdonald), the Greenbrier (1924, by Seth Raynor and George O'Neil), and the Meadows (1962). 26 U.S. presidents have stayed at the resort. During WWII the hotel served first as an internment facility for German, Italian, and Japanese diplomats, then as Ashford General Hospital. The East Wing — known as the West Virginia Wing — was built between 1959 and 1962 as cover for Project Greek Island, a secret Cold War congressional bunker buried 720 feet beneath it.