The cluster contains three named summits arranged around Abbott Lake, the manmade lake at the heart of the basin. Flat Top is the tallest. Harkening Hill is the smallest. Sharp Top, the most famous of the three, is the one most people climb - 1.5 miles up, with about 1,300 feet of elevation gain, ending in a 360-degree view that on a clear day reaches dozens of miles in every direction. There is also a separate cliff formation off the side of Sharp Top called Buzzard's Roost, with views nearly as good. For visitors who cannot make the climb, a shuttle from the Peaks of Otter Lodge takes you to within a fifteen-minute walk of the summit. Combined, the three peaks offer about twelve miles of hiking. Around Abbott Lake itself runs a flat, one-mile paved trail. A 1.6-mile loop leads to a waterfall two miles north on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

The origin of the name is genuinely uncertain. Archaeological evidence under Abbott Lake shows that Native Americans visited the Peaks for at least 8,000 years - hunting, traveling, resting. One theory is that the mountains got their name from the Cherokee word Otari, meaning high places. Another, more pedestrian, suggests they were named for the Otter River, which starts nearby and was presumably named for actual otters somewhere downstream. The most interesting theory traces the name to two early European settlers. In 1766, Thomas Wood and his family from Pennsylvania settled in the basin. National Park Service documents indicate that brothers Charles and Robert Ewing were among the early residents. Some have argued that the Peaks were named for the Ewing surname as pronounced in Scottish Gaelic: Clann Eoghain na h-Oitrich, meaning Clan Ewing of Otter. Similarly Otter-themed Scottish place names give the theory some weight, and the resemblance of Flat Top to Beinn Dorain, in the ancestral Ewing country of Argyll and Bute, gives it a bit more.

By 1834, the basin had its first inn. Polly Wood, a widow, opened what she called an Ordinary in her log cabin - a place where travelers could spend the night and get a warm meal. By the 1870s, Benjamin Wilkes had built the more substantial Mons Hotel, and the Peaks of Otter community had grown to over 20 families, a school, a church, and the hotel itself. The Johnson family, one of the original settlers, lived in their farmstead for three generations until the 1930s. The Johnson Farm is now historically restored and open for free tours June through September - a four-room log cabin first bought by John T. Johnson in 1852, with its outbuildings, gardens, and small orchard preserved in their 1930s form. By the early 1900s, the National Park Service had taken notice. Abbott Lake was created in 1964, along with the current Peaks of Otter Lodge, which still operates.

On the far side of Sharp Top, just off the summit, the wreckage of a B-25 bomber rests where it crashed during a World War II training exercise. Five Army airmen died in the impact. The aircraft was too heavy and the mountainside too steep for any recovery operation, so the plane simply remained where it fell. A small memorial sits on a rock at the top of the crash site. Most of the wreckage can still be found along the mountain, returning slowly to the rhododendron and the stone. The site is a quiet, sobering thing to encounter on a hike that began as a view-seeking exercise. A larger and more recent monument - the National D-Day Memorial - stands in Bedford, the small city nine miles southeast of the Peaks. Bedford lost a higher proportion of its sons on June 6, 1944, than any other community in the country.