Walking alongside the college campus on North Main Street in Davidson, following a little ridge line that marks the border between the Catawba and the Yadkin-Pee Dee river basins, my mother would mark the clearest days by stopping at a high point near the college entrance. She would then point west with one hand, put the other above her eyes as if saluting, and say, "There it is. Look way out there. You can see it. It's Grandfather."

Our mountains, beautiful as their rolling, forested peaks are, provide few landmarks as dramatic as Grandfather. Even Mount Mitchell is masked by other nearby high peaks in the Black Mountain range.

However, a few other North Carolina mountains or outcroppings stand out from their surroundings in ways that leave their viewers in awe.

Stone Mountain (near North Wilkesboro), Pilot Mountain (near Winston-Salem), Crowders Mountain (near Gastonia), and Chimney Rock (near Asheville), along with Grandfather, are among my favorites. Like the lighthouses that are symbols of our coast, these outcroppings are my mountain icons.

Each of these mountain icons has its special story. "Exploring the Geology of the Carolinas: A Field Guide to Favorite Places From Chimney Rock to Charleston," by UNC-Chapel Hill professor Kevin G. Stewart and Mary-Russell Roberson, persuades its readers that the geological story of the creation of each of these landmarks is almost as compelling as its visual impression. For some highlights, let's take a quick tour.

Let's start with Crowders Mountain. When I practiced law in a big office building in Charlotte, I enjoyed looking out the window at Crowders. Like its neighbor Kings Mountain, it stands out because it is so much higher than the surrounding lands. I always wondered how those mountains got there. It turns out that it is simply because they are made of very, very hard rock that has resisted the erosion that, over time, has worn down its surroundings.

Moving west to Chimney Rock, we learn that its beginnings were in silt and volcanic lava flow that accumulated on the bottom of an ancient ocean. Later, this ocean bottom was pushed upward as continent-sized landmasses crashed into each other. Subsequently erosion created its unique chimney shape.

Near the top of Grandfather, you can find rocks that look just like the worn-down, rounded stones that you can find in a river bottom. In fact, 750 million years ago these rocks had been carried by rivers and deposited in a valley. Later a continental collision pushed the valley upward and made it into a mountaintop.

Following the Blue Ridge Parkway takes us near the solid, uncovered granite face of North Carolina's Stone Mountain, which is a relatively young mountain, only about 300 million years old. Its youth helps explain why its rocky face is so solid. Since Stone Mountain's formation, there have been no more nearby continental collisions, like the ones that disrupted the rocky structure of most other North Carolina mountains.

We end our tour at Pilot Mountain. The hard rock of Pilot Mountain is quartz. This quartz was simply sand, part of a beach that, over hundreds of millions of years, became covered with silt and other deposits. It then sank beneath the earth's surface, where it was subjected to such extreme heat and pressure that the sand solidified into hunks of quartz. Later it was pushed upward by another one of those collisions of landmasses that characterized ancient geological history.

Have I told you too much? If I have, do not let it keep you from making your own tour of these icons, these "lighthouses of the mountains."

D.G. Martin is the host of "North Carolina Bookwatch," which airs Fridays at 9:30 p.m. and Sundays at 5 p.m. on UNC-TV. http://www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch/. Check his blog and view prior programs at www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch/