Andy Hatzos, Sun, 31 Jul 2022
I have some LiDAR for a few NC counties you asked about. Perhaps not as definitive as I'd like, but hopefully it helps.

For all three of these counties, there's a new LiDAR dataset from 2020 that is in progress but has not yet been published. No idea when it will be released. For now, I'm using 2014 data from the state. Ten image attachments, if they don't come across, let me know and I can get them to you in another way.

--------------------------------

BEAUFORT COUNTY

I found two areas with natural-looking elevations of above 66 feet, which are pretty obvious from the DEM, and I drew a couple very rough contours enclosing both areas on top of the aerial image. The smaller area is west of the train tracks, and the larger area straddles both sides of Chandler Road.

The second set of images zooms in on the Chandler Road area, so you can see how the DEM has what looks like a bunch of kinda spurious-looking values in the heavily vegetated areas. It's entirely possible that the highest points are indeed south of the road, as the DEM indicates. It's also possible that those are data artifacts as a result of the thick vegetation, and that the land there isn't that much higher than elsewhere around it.

Nonetheless, here's the best I can do with the current data, and hopefully you'll have some success finding a little bit of higher ground.

For the area west of the train tracks, my highest elevation is:
* 67.3 ft at N35.424356 W77.132017

To the south of Chandler Road, I found two high spots of about the same elevation:
* 68.3 ft at N35.425576 W77.127241
* 68.3 ft at N35.425248 W77.127249

I also found one spot north of Chandler Road, in the woods behind a house, that gets within a foot of the aforementioned areas. This is kind of a spurious data point too, though, so I'm not sure I'd consider it necessary to visit this one.
* 67.6 ft at N35.427238 W77.125255