he 5,964-foot peak is the only privately owned U.N. Biosphere Reserve among the 324 around the world. There's also Gerry the Bear and lots more to see and do on the peak that bills itself as "North Carolina's Top Attraction."

Early morning sunlight streams through the huge windows in the restaurant in Grandfather Mountain's nature museum. The room's only occupant is an older man in a navy blue V-neck sweater. Spread out on the table in front of him are a dozen large color photographs of the mountain in the brilliant reds and oranges of autumn.

The photographs are destined for newspapers across the Southeast, and the man contemplating them is Hugh Morton -- owner of Grandfather Mountain, photographic chronicler of its glories, and preserver of its future.

Morton is perhaps his mountain's most frequent visitor. Surely he's its most ardent admirer. He learned to love it as a child, inherited it when the family divided its holdings in 1952, and has since turned it into one of North Carolina's best known attractions. More often than not when you visit Grandfather, you run into him somewhere -- at a favorite overlook squinting through a long-lensed camera, eating a sandwich in the museum, crossing the swinging bridge. He probably rubs elbows with a goodly number of the quarter million visitors who come to the mountain annually, though few recognize him.

It's Morton's vision that has made Grandfather Mountain one of the North Carolina High Country's oldest attractions and one of its most tasteful. That it will remain so is now virtually assured. The Nature Conservancy has accepted control of more than 2,700 acres of Grandfather's back country.

"That means it will perpetually remain in a wild, natural state, used only for hiking and for scientific study," Morton says with satisfaction.

Grandfather's "paying operation" is limited to 500 acres, and includes a road to the top, the famed "Mile High Swinging Bridge," the summit visitor center, the nature museum, animal habitats, and McRae Meadows, where the Highland Games, and Singing on the Mountain draw huge crowds every year. Even the developed portion has been designed not to mar the mountain's natural beauty.

"We may add a habitat or two, and have visiting exhibits at the museum, but I don't anticipate many more man-made additions. We've tried to make the mountain inoffensively accessible, but not commercial," Morton says.

When he inherited the mountain, a rough, single-lane dirt road ran part way up the slope to a rickety wooden platform at "Cliffside," now an overlook and picnic area. A hiking trail provided access to the top. Morton's first step was to extend the road to the top of the mountain -- something he'd been urging the family to do -- and to add the summit parking lot, swinging bridge and summit visitor center.

"I was criticized by some for building the bridge," he says. "But my grandmother, who lived to be 93, was 90 when the bridge went in. She was able to walk across it to stand again on Linville Peak, a place she'd hiked to as a young lady. She burst into tears as she stood there -- said she'd believed she would never again have a chance to visit that peak. Her tears made the whole thing worthwhile, as far as I'm concerned."

It wasn't easy to borrow the money to begin development of what Morton was convinced could become a paying proposition.

"No one had loaned money on a mountain before," he says.

He plowed whatever he could of his profits back into the project. Eventually he was able to widen the road to the top to two lanes, and then to pave it.

Morton says he envied the Great Smoky Mountains for one of their wildlife draws -- the bears you nearly always caught sight of on drives from Cherokee to Gatlinburg. When the Wildlife Commission, which was trying to bring back the black bear population, asked him to buy a couple of bears for release, he dispatched an employee to the Atlanta Zoo to pick out a male and a female.

Unbeknownst to the employee, the female he chose had been raised on a bottle by the zoo's office staff. When the bears were released on the slopes of Grandfather, the male took off but the female "wanted to hang out." They shooed her off, and she made her way down to Linville and Pineola, where she ambled amiably up to golfers, stuck her head in kitchen windows and created general pandemonium. Wildlife officers recaptured her and returned her to Morton.

"They told me to let her get her picture made with my visitors during the day, but to put her up at night," he says. "That's how we got into the habitat business, because that bear was Mildred," the mountain's beloved mascot until she died a few years ago at the ripe old age of 26.

There's a bear on the mountain now named Gerry, who Morton swears is nice enough to be Mildred II. She came to Grandfather from Minnesota, where she was the subject of years of research by black bear expert Lynn Rogers. According to Morton, Gerry became imprinted on Rogers, sleeping next to him when he camped out. When research funds ran out, authorities suggested she be destroyed to keep her from bothering people. Instead, Rogers arranged to have Gerry sent to Grandfather Mountain.

Habitats for white-tailed deer, golden and bald eagles and panthers were added after the bear habitat was built for Mildred in 1973. The most recent habitat addition is a sign designating a rock wall and environs in the deer habitat as the "groundhog or woodchuck habitat," after the opportunistic feeders began helping themselves to visitors' peanuts the deer missed. The other new wildlife you're likely to encounter -- not in a habitat, but along the road to the summit -- is a flock of wild turkeys. Grandfather personnel moved them there from the highway near the entrance to protect them from hunters.

When Morton decided "we weren't doing a very good job of interpreting the mountain for visitors," he built the nature museum. Now five years old, its exhibits were designed by Rolland Hower, former chief of natural history exhibits for the Smithsonian Institution. The museum contains the finest collection of North Carolina rocks and minerals on display in the state; cases full of exquisite artificial plants; and exhibits on the mountain's rare and endangered flora and fauna, its geology, and on the effects of air pollution on the mountains. A life-size statue of Mildred and cubs that children love to climb upon and parents love to photograph stands just inside the entrance.

Since the museum opened, additions have been made to the exhibits. A new Bill Chrisman carving of a red-tailed hawk landing on a branch is so realistic, Morton set off a chorus of shrill protests from blue jays and squirrels when he set it outside to photograph in natural light before adding it to the museum's display of North Carolina birds.

Hower will return to Grandfather this winter to build exhibits in three empty display cases on the second floor of the summit visitor center. The displays, which will be finished by spring, will feature the Highland Games, Singing on the Mountain, and celebrities who have visited Grandfather Mountain -- Billy Graham, Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, Tom Hanks, Walter Cronkite, Johnny Cash "and goodness knows who all," Morton says.

Grandfather Mountain's ability to lure important visitors predates Morton's promotion of it -- by better than 150 years. August, 1994, marked the 200th anniversary of the visit to its summit by Andre Michaux, one of the early explorer/naturalists who found a botanical treasure trove in the Southern Appalachians. A new exhibit in the museum lobby includes photographs of many of the flora Michaux discovered, named and described -- large-flowered trillium, ironweed and umbrella leaf among them.

Michaux was under the impression he had reached the top of the highest mountain in North America at the end of his four-day climb to Grandfather's peak. At 5,964 feet, Grandfather isn't even the tallest mountain in North Carolina, though it's an arresting presence, rising majestically from the valley floor, the crown of the Blue Ridge. Rocky and wild, its 700-million-year-old blocky, green-tinged rock faces are shot through with milky quartz veins and lenses. Its slopes are clad in rhododendron, pink shell and flame azalea, mountain ash and maple, each of which transforms Grandfather for a brief spell of gorgeous bloom or flamboyant fall color. Often on winter days, the spruce/fir forest at the summit -- a remnant of an ecosystem driven south 10,000 years ago when ice sheets covered most of North America -- is encased in rime ice.

Morton rightly recognized long ago that Grandfather Mountain's scenic beauty -- in all kinds of weather and in every season -- was its number-one attraction. His decision to help his beloved mountain reveal its awesome wonders -- and his recent efforts to secure its preservation -- insure its continued appeal to visitors of every stripe.