Slightly Disappointing Places: Sauratown Mountain

This rocky ridge has loomed over Stokes County and a popular camp for a very long time. So what's it like at the top? Can't tell ya.

The spot where the public road ends on Sauratown Mountain (via Google Street View)

The Place: Sauratown Mountain in Stokes County.

Ooo, a mountain! What’s it look like at the top? Unclear! Last week, I was a chaperone on my son’s school trip to Camp Hanes up in Stokes County. After it was over, I asked him if he’d like to go up to the top of the mountain that had loomed over us for two days. Sure, he said. From the bottom, you could see homes, cell phone towers, TV and radio transmitters, and a fire tower. Google Maps showed a road that ran up along the ridge line. Surely we could get to the peak, I thought.

Nope. About a half mile before you hit the summit, you hit a gate.

There is no overlook. No trail. No trespassing signs are everywhere. We stopped in the road for a moment to look through a small hole in the trees to get a glimpse of the camp below. Then we drove back down.

What Camp Hanes looks like from a spot in the road in Sauratown Mountain.

Well that’s a bummer. How did it get that way? It got that way because back in the 1950s, a TV station needed a place to put a big tall tower and a transmitter. WSJS in Winston-Salem (which became WXII) had a small broadcast antenna in Kernersville, but it wanted a bigger one, so it asked the FCC if it could build a new tower on top of Sauratown Mountain. The agency said yes, so the station hastily bought 200 acres off of Delbert Hall and his wife in 1955, then built a road and essentially cordoned off the top. Over the years more broadcast towers were built on that land, and more recently a bunch of cell phone towers sprouted up. There are some houses up there too, and a bunch of those towers are essentially in their side yards. It’s a bit cramped up there.

So is there an overlook? There’s a fire tower near the summit, but you can’t get to it without crossing property that’s clearly marked as off-limits. Also, every scrap of land along the road seems to have one sign that sternly states that no trespassing is allowed, and another that mentions that there are cameras everywhere. It reminds me quite a bit of the kayak trip I took down the Cape Fear River almost a decade ago. The waterway was a public thoroughfare, but the land on either side had signs everywhere telling you to essentially go away.

So what happens if you try to go to the top anyway? In 2021, some guy wrote a short entry on peakbagger.com where he told of his “successful” attempt to get to the summit. He ignored the copious warning signs and bushwhacked his way through woods and briars until he found a rocky outcropping that seemed to be higher than the rest. After that, the trouble began:

Heading back to my car I opted not to do the bushwhack and elected instead to walk the road which swings by a tv station antenna and when I swung by on the road a rather loud alarm went off. Nearing the gate I was met by a county sheriff sergeant. Shortly thereafter I was sitting handcuffed in the back of his patrol vehicle. Various conversations and discussions ensued and I was uncuffed and sent on my way with a warning.

A few others who have made it up without being arrested conveyed a feeling of meh. Why? They said the top has been flattened to make way for the towers, they didn’t like having to sneak around, and so on. For what it’s worth, I am not recommending you do like they did! There are other peaks nearby at Pilot Mountain and Hanging Rock that are within the Sauratown range and are perfectly fine to climb. More on them in a bit.

So has anything interesting happened up there? Depends on how far back you want to look. The mountains are named after the Saura tribe, which thought of Pilot Mountain as a sacred place and a landmark for navigation. But they’ve been gone from the area for hundreds of years. Back in 1958, a few sailors went AWOL, and hid out in a cave on the mountain for a while. They knew about it from going to camp nearby as kids. There have also been rescues. In 1968, a 13-year-old boy from Chapel Hill was with his classmates on a trip to Camp Hanes and wanted to get a closer look at the tower. So he tried scampering up one of the cliffs and got stuck about 100 feet from the top. “I just wanted to climb it the hard way,” he told the Winston-Salem Journal. “That’s why I’m in the Advancement School.”

(You can, legally, climb some of those rock faces today, as long as you go through the Carolina Climbers Coalition, which keeps everything neat and tidy and partners with Camp Hanes.)

Most recently, the mountain was in the news for catching on fire. In November of 2023, a campfire got loose and ended up burning 800 acres. It was a hard fire to fight because there was only one road up to the top, and some spots were really steep or rocky. A few buildings were damaged, but nothing burned down, thanks to the efforts of a lot of out-of-town crews who helped local firefighters.

Pictures from the wildfire on Sauratown Mountain in late 2023

You can still see some of the fire lines up on the slopes today.

So obviously they built some big tall structures up on a mountaintop. Isn’t there some rule that prevents stuff like that? Kind of? If you’ve ever been up to Sugar Mountain over in Avery County, you’ve seen the Sugar Top condos that stick out like a sore thumb from the top of a ridge. They went up in 1983, and people were really pissed off because they thought it ruined the views. They almost immediately went out and got a law passed that bans anything like it from ever going up on a mountaintop in North Carolina ever again. But! The Mountain Ridge Protection Act only bans the construction of buildings greater than 40 feet on ridges above 3,000 feet that are 500 feet above the valley floor below. Because of that, the law only applies to 24 mountain counties, and Stokes isn’t one of them (The peak of Sauratown Mountain is only 2,443 feet, although it does rise about 1,000 feet above the valley below). The tallest towers in the mountain went up in the 1950s through the 1970s, so even if the law covered them, they would have been grandfathered in anyhow.

So why didn’t anyone try to preserve the top of Sauratown Mountain like they did with Hanging Rock and Pilot Mountain? First off, Hanging Rock is the O.G. of parks in that area, but it was originally going to be a mountain resort bankrolled by a bunch of Floridians in the late 1920s. That plan ran head-first into the Great Depression. In the mid-1930s, the state took over the land. and had the Civilian Conservation Corps turn it into a park, which opened in the 1940s. Pilot Mountain had private owners from the mid 19th century until 1968, when it too was turned over to the state and transformed from a private park into a public one. Once again, fear of development got the locals fired up and led to preservation.

A view of Sauratown Mountain from Camp Hanes.

For what it’s worth, the TV station owners had looked at Hanging Rock and Pilot Mountain as the location of their new tower in the 1950s, but thought that those two places were a bit too rugged. So instead, those places became beloved parks. Sauratown, which is a little bit shorter, got the big metal structures, gates, cameras, and sternly-worded signs. Even so, it’s loomed over the YMCA’s Camp Hanes on the south side and another camp on the north side for generations at this point. During my trip, I just kept gazing up at it. Each mountain is a spectacle. Some are for play. This one has a job.