“That’s 10 feet of water!” said Amy Renfranz, director of education for the Grandfather Mountain Stewardship Foundation, the nonprofit organization that owns and operates the Linville, N.C., nature park. “Though we had several big days of rain and snow, most of it fell in small amounts throughout the year.”

That total is nearly double the annual average of 63.13 inches, with the largest precipitation events including 6.41 inches of rain on May 19 and 5.84 inches on Sept. 17. The mountain’s rainiest day in history remains Sept. 8, 2004, when 11.3 inches fell. 

While the top of the mountain had its wettest year ever, measurements taken at Mile High Swinging Bridge ranked it the fifth-wettest, with 77.36 inches of rain compared to 89.25 inches in 1979. Measurements there were made as part of the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network, known as CoCoRaHS. Grandfather Mountain naturalists have been participating since 2011. 

Other notable data from 2018 include:

• Two gusts above 100 miles per hour were recorded — a 101.9-mile-per-hour gust on March 2 and a 101.7-mile-per-hour gust on Oct. 20, both at Mile High Swinging Bridge. The record at that location is 120.7 miles per hour, set in December 2012. 
• Grandfather Mountain experienced a temperature range of 83.8 degrees in 2018, with the lowest recorded temperature -6.64 degrees on Jan. 19 and the highest 77.2 degrees on May 13. The all-time records are a low of -32 degrees on Jan. 21, 1985, and a high of 83.2 degrees on July 1, 2012. 
• The temperature at Grandfather Mountain is typically 10 to 20 degrees cooler than in the flatlands below.