The Blue Ridge Mountains

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There's no place on earth more beautiful than the southern Appalachians, specifically, the Blue Ridge Mountains!!!  It is truly God's little acre... and I wish I could rent a little of it.

I know there's taller mountains, wider rivers, deeper gorges and all that stuff.  Even here in America, the Alaska Range, Sierra Nevada, and Rocky Mountains are all good examples of just such ranges.  The snow caps are better defined in the winter, and gorge rivers may offer stretches of better whitewater in the summer.  Still, to me, they pale in comparison!  The colors of the leaves in fall, fresh snow on a 200 year old chuch or empty tree branches in winter, a shallow mountain stream in spring, or the magnitude of diversity of plant and animal life in the summer has no equal, not anywhere on earth.  None of the other ranges can offer any of this!

Theories abound as to how the Appalachians got their name, but most seem to pivot around Hernando De Soto and the Apalachee indian tribe of northern Florida.  The Appalachian Mountains are actually a system of long ridges divided into several ranges and are located in eastern North America.  They extend approximately 1600 miles from Quebec to northern Georgia.  Hiking enthusiasts may be intrigued by the 2100 mile Appalachian Trail that spans fourteen states, beginning at Springer Mountain in northern Georgia and ending at Mount Katahdin, Maine.  Funny how the range spans 1600 miles while the trail is 2100...  Anyway, the trail isn't for the faint of heart though, as the entire trip can take up to six months.  For a full list of the Appalachian ridges, see Peakware's Appalachian Mountains article.

Of these, the Blue Ridge Mountains are named for their bluish haze.  The Cherokee, hundreds of years before De Soto came, called this land Shaconage or "the place of blue smoke."  They are the highest and eastern most range.  They are also said to be the oldest mountain range on Earth.  The Blue Ridge Mountains extend from southern Pennsylvania to northern Georgia and a good portion of it is protected as either national or state forests.  Shenandoah National Park, The Blue Ridge Parkway, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park are all part of the Blue Ridge Mountains chain.  For more information on how to protect these, and our other, National Park treasures, check out the National Park Conservation Association website.

I'm only familiar with the range from the Great Smoky Mountains down.  I actually spent some time in the mountains of north Georgia as a youngster.  Now, I've been gone longer than I was ever in them, but I still miss them and get up there whenever I can get out of the flat pine/palm tree infested swamp I now call home.  One day, I hope to get up to Shenandoah National Park and other parts of the range between there and the Smokys.  This, and other pages linked here, only contain information on parts of the mountains I know about.  Enjoy...

A Curiosity

From the moment of birth, a salmon, never yet traveling the oceans, knows which river or stream must be traversed to spawn.  A bird, never yet having had first flight, knows how to build its first nest just like the kind dear old mom used to make.  The animal kingdom survives and thrives on instinct. 

As a function of genetics, we get some stuff (hair color, eye color, facial features, skin tone, etc.) from our parents.  As a function of anthropology, we know that as a people move away from the equator, hair, eyes and skin color generally get lighter.  As for the rest, we seem to have lost any instinctive abilities we ever had as humans.

However, I've often wondered if we are "wired" for some things that aren't quite so tangible.  Somewhere in the woodpile of my make up (my parents did tons of genealogy work), I know that my ancestral heritage is partially a combination of Scottish and Cherokee.  I've always been drawn to the mountains which have been home to these people for millenia.  Are my ancestral heritage and my desire to be in the mountains linked through some instinctive connection?  Just a question....