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Carolina Curious: How were the Sauratown Mountains formed?

Pilot Mountain and Sauratown mountain peaks as seen from Moore's Knob in Hanging Rock State Park. PAUL GARBER/WFDD

Pilot Mountain and Sauratown mountain peaks as seen from Moore's Knob in Hanging Rock State Park. PAUL GARBER/WFDD

While the Triad area is part of the foothills, we do have a mountain range we can call our own. It includes the landmark Pilot Knob.

For this week's Carolina Curious, WFDD's Paul Garber was wondering: How did the Sauratown Mountains form here, and what sets them apart?

Pilot Mountain State Park Superintendent Jason Anthony knows it can be weird for visitors when they first see Pilot’s famous dome in the chain of peaks sometimes called “the mountains away from the mountains.”

“People don’t expect it when they’re coming up Highway 52 if they’ve never been here before," he says. "They just see this thing coming out. 'What is this?'”

Anthony says there are various theories on the origins of these mountains, but the idea is that they began beneath a vast ocean that eventually flowed into the Atlantic. 

"Layers of sediment were deposited underneath the water, and as the waters receded, the mountains were pushed up through pl

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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