Mount Gundabad

At the north end of the Misty Mountains, where the range comes closest to the western arm of the Grey Mountains, stands Gundabad. The Dwarves hold the mountain sacred, and the reason reaches back to the beginning of their kind: Durin the Deathless, eldest of the Seven Fathers, woke there. The claim was never given up, though the mountain was not theirs to keep. Orcs took it in the middle years of the Second Age and made it a seat of their own, and a stronghold of the northern Orcs is what it stayed, age after age. It lies far from any settled country, so what goes on inside it is mostly guessed at from outside, which has suited every power that has held it.