Spruce Knob Summit

At 4,863 feet, Spruce Knob is the highest ground in West Virginia and the highest point along the entire Allegheny Mountains. A short paved loop, the Whispering Spruce Trail, circles the summit and passes a stone observation tower built by trail crews, from which the view reaches out over ridge after parallel ridge, part of the long folded backbone of the central Appalachians.

The summit is remote by design. It is reached only by a long climb up a winding gravel forest road that leaves the valley near Riverton and gains thousands of feet as it works up Spruce Mountain. The effort keeps crowds thin and the mountaintop quiet, and on a clear day the reward is one of the widest views in the eastern mountains.

The character of the summit is written by the wind. Cold westerly gales sweep almost constantly across the exposed crest, and the red spruce that cling to the ridge respond by growing branches only on their sheltered eastern side. The result is a forest of one-sided, flag-shaped trees that lean away from the prevailing wind, a striking and much-photographed sight.

Between the spruce lie open barrens of rock, heath, and low blueberry and huckleberry, more like a northern or subalpine landscape than the hardwood forests of the lower slopes. This is a remnant of a cooler climate, a pocket of high-country habitat left behind as the ice ages retreated, and it supports plants and animals rarely found elsewhere in the state.

Spruce Knob anchors the Spruce Knob-Seneca Rocks National Recreation Area and stands at the edge of a great sweep of protected land. Just below the summit lies a mountain lake and the trailheads into a large backcountry wilderness of spruce forest, open meadows, and cold headwater streams, a network of trails that draws backpackers looking for solitude.

These high forests were nearly stripped bare a century ago, when logging and the fires that followed swept the red spruce off the ridges. Much of what stands today is recovered forest, slowly returning to the cool, mossy spruce woods that once blanketed the highest Alleghenies. Black bear, deer, snowshoe hare, and a rich variety of birds move through the recovering woods.

This high country was ancestral homeland and shared hunting ground of the Shawnee, the Lenape, the Cherokee, the Moneton, and the Haudenosaunee, who traveled the Allegheny ridges and valleys long before European settlers arrived. None of those nations is federally recognized in West Virginia today, and their descendant nations continue in other states, but the mountains they knew still stand across the whole horizon from the summit.

The night sky at Spruce Knob is among the darkest in the eastern United States, far from any city glow. On a clear, moonless night the Milky Way arcs overhead in a band of light, and the same wind that shapes the spruce keeps the air clear and cold, making the summit a favorite of stargazers as well as hikers.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.