54 Fun Facts About Appalachian Mountains

The Appalachian Mountains run from central Alabama northeast to which Canadian island?

Newfoundland: the range ends in its highlands, and the International Appalachian Trail is being extended along the island's mountainous west coast.

The 1972 film Deliverance shot its canoe scenes on which southern Appalachian river?

Chattooga: the film drew crowds of rafters and tourists to the river, and in 1974 Congress made it a Wild and Scenic River.

Which French overseas territory means the Appalachians technically span three countries?

Saint Pierre and Miquelon went back to France under the 1763 Treaty of Paris, even as France gave up the rest of New France.

The Appalachians are geologically related to which mountains across the Atlantic, from the same Pangean range?

The Scottish Highlands share that ancient chain's rocks, so the International Appalachian Trail now follows Scotland's West Highland Way.

The three mountain-building orogenies that formed the modern Appalachians began roughly how long ago?

480 million years: as an ancient ocean closed, colliding landmasses piled rock onto North America's edge and pushed up the range.

Which American composer wrote the score for Martha Graham's ballet Appalachian Spring?

Aaron Copland wrote it as 'Ballet for Martha'; Graham took the title from a Hart Crane poem, and Copland said he wasn't thinking about the Appalachians.

Long before Pangaea, which supercontinent's formation about 1.1 billion years ago began the Appalachians' geologic story?

Rodinia formed as ancient continents collided, and its later breakup opened the ocean whose closing eventually built the Appalachians.

The final mountain-building event that raised the Appalachians came from a collision with which continent?

Africa's collision helped assemble Pangaea, and when the continents split, part of the same range stayed behind in Morocco as the Anti-Atlas.

The name Appalachian derives from a village name transcribed by which Spanish party in 1528?

The Narváez expedition wrote down 'Apalchen' near present-day Tallahassee, and the Spanish later applied the name to lands far inland.

Which writer proposed renaming the United States 'Appalachia' in the early 19th century?

Washington Irving argued the nation needed a distinctive name of its own rather than borrowing 'America' from a whole continent.

Which Bill Bryson book, later a Robert Redford film, recounts his attempt to hike the Appalachian Trail?

A Walk in the Woods set off a surge of new hikers on the trail, even though Bryson himself never walked all of it.

Which country singer wrote and sang 'Coal Miner's Daughter'?

Loretta Lynn's memoir of the same name became a best seller and inspired a 1980 hit film starring Sissy Spacek.

Which forester conceived the Appalachian Trail in a 1921 regional-planning proposal?

Benton MacKaye pictured the trail linking shelter camps and farm camps where city workers could escape to the mountains.

Which South Carolina governor's staff said he was hiking the Appalachian Trail?

Mark Sanford had actually been in Argentina, and after being spotted at Atlanta's airport he admitted an extramarital affair.

What colour are the paint blazes that mark the Appalachian Trail?

White blazes mark a footpath that crews keep relocating, one reason the trail's official length changes slightly each year.

What is the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail?

Springer Mountain, Georgia, replaced Mount Oglethorpe as the terminus in 1958, after development spread around the old southern end.

What is the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail?

Henry David Thoreau set out for Mount Katahdin in 1846 and described the climb in 'Ktaadn', the opening chapter of The Maine Woods.

Which families feuded along the Tug Fork in Appalachia?

The Hatfields and McCoys' feud was fed by a disputed hog, a romance between the families, arson and murder.

Which town, headquarters of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, does the trail pass through?

Harpers Ferry gained fame in 1859 when abolitionist John Brown raided its federal armory, hoping to start an uprising of enslaved people.

What did Earl Shaffer say he wanted to walk off on his 1948 Appalachian Trail thru-hike?

The war had killed Walter Winemiller, the friend Earl Shaffer planned the hike with, so he walked partly in his honor after his own Army service.

Which grandmother thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail alone in 1955 with a shower curtain for shelter?

Emma Gatewood said afterward that she had thought the hike would be 'a nice lark. It wasn't.'

Which subrange of the Blue Ridge contains Mount Mitchell?

Logging stripped much of the Black Mountains by the early 1900s, which pushed North Carolina to make Mount Mitchell its first state park in 1915.

Mount Mitchell is named after a professor who died how?

Elisha Mitchell died in 1857, apparently falling at a waterfall while verifying his measurements against a rival claim by former student Thomas Clingman.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park holds roughly two per square mile of which large animal?

Black bears that get human food lose their fear of people, and aggressive encounters in the park clustered where tourists handed out food.

In 2016, a wildfire that began inside Great Smoky Mountains National Park swept into which tourist town?

Gatlinburg burned as the fires killed 14 people and destroyed homes, cabins and churches across Sevier County.

Which president dedicated Great Smoky Mountains National Park at Newfound Gap's Rockefeller Memorial?

Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the park in 1940; John D. Rockefeller Jr. had given $5 million to buy its land, in memory of his mother.

Which nickname belongs to the park road along Fontana Lake's north shore in the Great Smoky Mountains?

The Road to Nowhere was promised to replace a highway flooded by Fontana Lake, but environmental problems stalled it after about six miles.

Which insects put on a famous synchronised display at Elkmont in the Smokies each late spring?

Fireflies' flashes fall into step as more males join the display, while females answer from the forest floor.

Where does the 'smoky' in Great Smoky Mountains come from?

Natural fog that looks like smoke plumes gave the range its name, but haze from power plants and cars now often shrinks the long views.

What was Clingmans Dome, the Appalachian Trail's highest point, renamed in September 2024?

Kuwohi replaced the name of Thomas Clingman, a senator who later became a Confederate general, at the request of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

Which 469-mile road linking Shenandoah and the Smokies is America's longest linear park?

Blue Ridge Parkway was an idea born of the Great Depression, built partly to put as many people as possible to work.

What is the only public road through Shenandoah National Park called?

Skyline Drive runs 105 miles along the crest, so when storms close it, visitors can still enter the park only on foot.

Which frontiersman led the team that blazed the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap?

Daniel Boone's axmen blazed it in 1775, and hundreds of thousands of settlers soon followed it through the gap into Kentucky.

A New Hampshire mountaintop observatory's famous slogan calls its summit home of the world's worst what?

Weather: the slogan traces to a 1940 article whose author found the summit's worst matched or slightly exceeded only on the highest mountains and in Antarctica.

The Northeast's highest peak belongs to which New Hampshire group of summits?

Climbers preparing for peaks as high as Everest train in the Presidential Range, often on its winter routes.

Which Maine governor spent much of his personal fortune buying the state's highest peak and the land around it?

Percival Baxter bought the land after the legislature wouldn't fund a park, then gave it to Maine on condition it be kept 'forever wild'.

Which Appalachian subrange does the Long Trail, America's oldest long-distance hiking trail, follow along its spine?

The Green Mountains were home to Ethan Allen's militia, the Green Mountain Boys, who seized Fort Ticonderoga from the British in 1775.

Which Canadian national park in the Appalachians' Long Range Mountains exposes rock from Earth's mantle?

Gros Morne's Tablelands are a rare outcrop of Earth's mantle, pushed skyward when continents collided, and they helped make the park a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Which singer's Imagination Library began in 1995 by mailing free books to young children in her home county near the Smokies?

Dolly Parton started it in honor of her father, who never learned to read or write.

What is the highest natural point in Virginia?

Wild ponies graze the grassy balds near Mount Rogers, kept there to stop the open meadows from growing back into forest.

Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina is best known for what attraction, built in 1952?

A mile-high swinging bridge? It's 'mile high' only by elevation above sea level, and 'swinging' because it sways in strong winds.

What gives the Blue Ridge Mountains their bluish colour when seen from a distance?

Isoprene released by trees makes the natural blue haze, but much of the haze seen from these mountains today is pollution.

Which introduced fungal disease killed billions of the trees that once dominated many Appalachian forests?

Chestnut blight kills the trunk but not the roots, so American chestnuts survive mostly as sprouts the fungus kills before they mature.

Which giant Appalachian stream animal breathes mostly through the wrinkled folds of its skin?

The hellbender needs cool, clear water, so habitat loss and dirtier streams have wiped out or shrunk most of its known populations.

Bluegrass music takes its name from which bandleader's group?

Bill Monroe named his band the Blue Grass Boys for Kentucky, the Bluegrass State, and the whole genre later took its name from the band.

The Appalachian dulcimer belongs to which instrument family?

The Appalachian dulcimer, a zither, was revived in the 1950s folk boom by Kentucky singer Jean Ritchie, who had learned it from her father.

Which president signed the act creating the Appalachian Regional Commission?

Lyndon B. Johnson signed it in 1965, finishing work John F. Kennedy had begun by convening an Appalachian commission in 1963.

Which is the only state lying entirely within the Appalachian Regional Commission's Appalachia?

West Virginia exists because western counties that opposed Virginia's 1861 secession formed a Union-loyal government, then became a state in 1863.

Which two types of coal are found in major deposits across the Appalachians?

Anthracite and bituminous coal share the same layers: where the mountains folded, heat and pressure turned bituminous seams into anthracite.

Which predator was reintroduced to the Great Smoky Mountains in 1991 but removed in 1998?

Red wolves failed to take hold in the park, so the survivors were moved to North Carolina's Alligator River refuge.

Which valley in Great Smoky Mountains National Park preserves settlers' cabins, churches and barns along an 11-mile loop road?

Cades Cove residents were promised they could stay, but the park took the whole cove, and leading citizen John W. Oliver lost his eminent-domain fight.

Which mountains, with the Blue Ridge, were the source of a competing 19th-century name for the whole range?

Even 'Alleghania' was floated as a name for the entire chain.

The 1859 discovery that launched the modern US petroleum industry happened in the Appalachians of which state?

Pennsylvania's Drake Well struck oil in 1859 after Edwin Drake drove iron pipe down to bedrock to keep groundwater from caving in the hole.

Which Appalachian gorge's bridge is the scene of Bridge Day, when BASE jumpers leap from it each October?

New River Gorge's bridge turned a long drive down narrow mountain roads into a crossing of under a minute.