Cold Mountain is a remote 6,030-foot summit in western North Carolina’s Great Balsam Mountains, within Pisgah National Forest and beside the Shining Rock Wilderness. Ranked the 40th tallest mountain in the eastern United States, it is reached by a notably strenuous hike. The broader area was first inhabited by Indigenous peoples whose Woodland and South Appalachian Mississippian cultures were ancestors of the Cherokee. In the modern era, land here passed from George Washington Vanderbilt II’s estate to the United States Forest Service through his widow’s sale, helping create Pisgah National Forest, the first national forest in the eastern United States. Later literary fame from Charles Frazier’s 1997 novel brought Cold Mountain wide recognition.