Elk Knob State Park
8 Trails
16 POIs
9 Peaks
2 Picnic Sites
Description
Elk Knob State Park is an 3,680-acre (14.9 km2) North Carolina state park in Watauga County, North Carolina, in the United States. Opened in 2003, it is one of North Carolina's newest state parks. Elk Knob State Park was established to preserve the natural state of Elk Knob, the second highest peak in Watauga County. The park is open for year-round recreation and is currently undergoing an expansion of facilities to provide greater recreational opportunities to visitors. Elk Knob State Park is on Meat Camp Road, 5.5 miles (8.9 km) from North Carolina Highway 194, 9.5 miles (15.3 km) north of Boone, in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Elk Knob State Park is one of the newest state parks in North Carolina. Recreational opportunities are limited since the facilities at the park have not yet been fully built, and they will remain somewhat limited since one of the original goals of the park is to maintain it as a natural area. An old road that leads to the summit of Elk Knob served as the park's initial hiking trail, but it is steep and rocky, making it a difficult hike. A less steep and easier to ascend hiking trail was constructed with the help of volunteers, and it was finished September 4, 2011. The old road is planned to be formally closed to hiking, so the process of secondary succession will be encouraged on the road bed. Upon reaching the summit hikers are can view Mount Jefferson, Grandfather Mountain, Mount Mitchell, and various peaks in Tennessee and Virginia. In the fall of 2012, the park opened up a back-country camping area for backpackers. The facilitates consist of 3 individual sites, two group sites, and a "zone camping area", where up to three sites may be established by backpackers. No campfires are permitted, and campers must use bear canisters. The park has allowed limited front-country camping during the weekend of the National Wildlife Federation's Great American Backyard Campout. A small picnic area was provides several picnic tables and grills, along a forested, road loop. Also, a small office area was constructed near the park's entrance.
Trails in the Hikepack map
- Chestnut Grove Road
- Elk Knob Trail
- Lee South Road
- Replogle Drive
- Tater Hill Estates Drive
Attractions in the Hikepack map
- Elk Knob
- Ellison Mountain
- Greene Knob
- Harmon Knob
- Meat Camp
- Pottertown
- Rich Mountain
- Rich Mountain Bald
- Rittle Knob
- Rocky Knob
- Snake Mountain
Copyright
The PDF and JPG maps are released by Hikepack under the Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Contains data ©OpenStreetMap contributors (https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright) under the Open Database License (https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/). Topographic map based on elevation data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Aerial imagery available from the U.S. Geological Survey. Description text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License). Cover image ©bobistraveling https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_Trail_Elk_Knob_NC_SP_0914.jpg CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/).
