Aluminum smelting requires staggering amounts of electricity, and in the 1910s and 1920s very little electricity was available in rural North Carolina. Alcoa solved the problem by building its own. The Yadkin Project eventually placed four hydroelectric dams in a line along the river: High Rock, Tuckertown, Narrows (which created Badin Lake), and Falls. Together they generate around 215 megawatts at peak. High Rock was first because it was furthest upstream, which meant it could be used both for power and for managing water levels in everything below. The Badin smelter opened in 1917, ran for nine decades, and closed in 2007. Alcoa kept the dams until 2016, when it sold the entire Yadkin Project to Cube Hydro Carolinas. The four-lake chain still spins. The aluminum is gone.

Both the mountain and the lake take their name from a particular outcropping. About half a mile east of the dam, on a ridge of the Uwharrie Mountains, a large mass of exposed rock rises above the surrounding country. The Uwharries themselves are an ancient range, once as tall as the Rockies, ground down by half a billion years of weathering into the modest peaks visible today. High Rock Mountain is the tallest of what remains, and from its summit the view extends across one of the most expansive piedmont landscapes in the region. The dam sits in a small gorge directly below, where the river had cut through the ridge over geologic time. The lake spreads upstream from there for nineteen miles, all the way to the mouth of the South Yadkin River near Salisbury, fed by creeks named Flat Swamp, Abbotts, Buddle, Panther, and Crane.

In 1994 the Bassmaster Classic, the annual world championship of competitive bass fishing, came to High Rock Lake. It returned in 1995 and 1998. Anglers travel from across the country for the largemouth bass, drawn by the lake's relatively shallow water and the heavy cover of stumps, brush, and weed beds that the bass love. The lake also holds channel, blue, and flathead catfish; crappie; bluegill and shellcracker; striped bass and their hybrids; and white bass. The Yadkin River State Canoe Trail, with its Daniel Boone Heritage section, runs the length of the lake and terminates at the York Hill Access, allowing paddlers to follow water that Boone himself crossed when he was a young surveyor working out of nearby Rowan County.

Because High Rock was managed for power and downstream supply rather than for the lakefront homeowners who multiplied around it after World War II, the lake levels swung dramatically. Summer drawdowns left families staring at acres of dry mudflat and stranded docks. The 2002 drought was the worst on record: water levels fell twenty-four feet below normal pond, fish died of low oxygen and crowding, the air smelled rancid, and tourism collapsed. Federal and state agencies eventually shut the dam to let the lake recover. The 2007-2008 drought triggered new operating rules. Alcoa reduced fall outflow from 1,400 to 900 cubic feet per second, capped releases at inflow rates to prevent rapid drops, and committed to keep High Rock and Badin at parity. The agreements have largely held. Water quality concerns about turbidity, pH, and chlorophyll-a remain on High Rock; PCB advisories still apply downstream at Badin.

The shoreline of High Rock runs 360 miles, more than the distance from Charlotte to Washington D.C. It is lined with privately owned homes ranging from modest cabins to lakefront estates, hidden in coves like Abbotts Creek where the water widens out into long, branching arms. Boat ramps and boathouses can no longer be added, but existing ones can be maintained, and the lake has no horsepower limits or hours of operation. Communities all along the lake, Lexington, Salisbury, Southmont, Spencer, and Denton, organize their summers around it. Sailing regattas race the main trunk where it widens past a mile across. The lake was an industrial byproduct of an aluminum company's need for cheap power. It became, almost incidentally, the largest piece of public-facing water in the central piedmont, and a fixture of central North Carolina life.