Pisgah National Forest

Scientific forestry in America began in the woods of Pisgah National Forest. In the 1890s George Washington Vanderbilt II hired Gifford Pinchot and then German forester Carl Schenck to manage the forests around his Biltmore Estate near Asheville, and in 1898 Schenck opened the Biltmore Forest School, the first forestry school in the country. After Vanderbilt's death, his widow Edith sold about 86,700 acres (351 km²) of the estate to the federal government in 1914, among the first purchases under the Weeks Act. Pisgah National Forest was established in 1916, and the school site is now the Cradle of Forestry in America.

The forest covers about 510,000 acres (2,075 km²) of the Blue Ridge and Black Mountains in western North Carolina. The Blue Ridge Parkway runs through it, and its landmarks include the granite dome of Looking Glass Rock, the deep Linville Gorge Wilderness with its pockets of old-growth forest, and the bald summits of Shining Rock and Max Patch. Its name comes from the biblical Mount Pisgah. Hurricane Helene struck in September 2024 with floods and landslides that destroyed roads and trails across the forest, and the Forest Service has been reopening sites in stages since.

• The Blue Ridge Parkway
  America's longest scenic parkway contains
• North Carolina
  The Tar Heel State, from the Blue Ridge to the Outer Banks located in
• Great Smoky Mountains National Park
  The most visited national park in the country near
• The Appalachian Mountains
  The ancient, worn mountains of the eastern U.S. part of