ley. Similar in topography in its rough, broken steepness
to the Alleghenies across the valley, it consists of a multitude of
saddles or dividing ridges many of which attain an elevation of six
thousand feet. As it extends south, rising from the Piedmont Plateau, it
grows higher. In North Carolina alone there are twenty-one peaks that
exceed Mt. Washington's six thousand feet in New Hampshire. Contiguous
to the Blue Ridge there is another chain between the states of North
Carolina and Tennessee, which to Carolina mountaineers is still the
Alleghenies. However, the United States Geological Survey has another
name for it--the Unakas. It is higher as a whole than the Blue Ridge to
which it is joined by transverse ranges with such names as Beech and
Balsam and a sprinkling of Indian names--Cowee, Nantahala, Tusquitee. It
differs, too, in physical aspect. Instead of being in orderly parallel
tiers the entire system, unlike the Blue Ridge, is cut by many rivers:
the Nolichucky, French Broad, Pigeon, Little Tennessee, Hiawassee. The
parts so formed by the dividing rivers are also named: Iron, Northern
Unaka, Bald, Great Smoky, Southern Unaka or Unicoi. Though many of its
summits exceed six thousand feet, the chain itself dwindles to foothills
by the time it reaches Georgia and crosses into Alabama.

If you flew high over the vast domain of the Blue Ridge, you would view
a country of contrasting physical features: river and cascade, rapids
and waterfall, peak and plateau, valley and ridge. Its surface is
rougher, its trails steeper, the descents deeper, and there are more of
them to the mile than anywhere else in the United States.

The southern mountaineer has to travel many steep, rocky roads to get to
any level land, so closely are the mountains of Appalachia crowded
together. It is the geography of their country that has helped to keep
our highlanders so isolated all these years.

This region has the finest body of hardwood timber in the United States.
Black walnut is so plentiful and so easy for the carpenter to work that
this wood has been used freely for gunstocks and furniture, and even in
barns, fences, and porches.

White and yellow poplars grow sometimes six to nine feet in diameter.
"Wide enough for a marrying couple, their waiters, and the elder to
stand on," a mountaineer will say, pointing out a tree stump left smooth
by the cross-cut saw. The trunks are sixty to seventy feet to the first
limb. Chestnuts are e