On Saturday, Feb. 16th we made a wonderful journey to the Uwharrie Mountains. The trip starts becoming really scenic as we turned off Hwy. 49 a little west of Asheboro onto Bombay School Rd. After a few more turns the ancient Uwharries, perhaps the oldest range in the U.S., begin to show their battered shoulders.
The Uwharrie Mountains may have originated around 500 million years ago with peaks higher than 20,000 ft. Today they try hard to reach 1,000 ft. above sea level. Some newer evidence indicates that the Uwharrie Mountains were probably connected to a super continent and broke away from what is now Africa. They, along with much of what is now the Eastern section of the U.S., gradually slammed into and formed North America.
The Uwharrie Mountains became a national forest in 1961 during the administration of President Kennedy. These mountains and especially their unique deposits of rhyolite, fine grained volcanic rock that made excellent spearpoints and tools, became very important to Native Americans around 9,000 B.C. Ancient Indian tools from Morrow Mountain rhyolite deposits have been found from Maine to Florida.
