Mount Equinox, Vermont

A 7,000 acre private wooded reserve owned by reclusive monks, where the nation's "longest paved private toll road" rises 3,200 feet up to the top of Mount Equinox. The property was amassed and developed starting in the 1930s, by a chemist, engineer and executive at Union Carbide by the name of Dr. Joe Davidson. Davidson held many patents and specialized in the development and application of materials such as ethylene glycol and Bakelite, and helped develop mustard gas in WWI, and nuclear bombs in WWII (as a principal engineer for Union Carbide's gaseous diffusion uranium enrichment factories at Oak Ridge, and later Paducah, Kentucky). He started vacationing in Vermont, and eventually bought all of Equinox Mountain. He made the five mile Skyline Drive road to the summit from 1941-1947; built reservoirs and hydroelectric plants to generate his own electricity; and built two lodges, and two houses on the site. He gave it all to a reclusive Roman Catholic order of monks called the Carthusians, who built a monastery, the Charterhouse of the Transfiguration, out of 18-inch thick floor-to-ceiling granite blocks in 1970. No outside visitors, or women, have been admitted to the Monastery since. The order operates the toll road, which is open to the public, and which provides panoramic views of the region, including the distant monastery, and hydroelectric lakes named after Davidson's wife and dog.