Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Appalachian Mountains run 2,050 miles from the Island of Newfoundland in Canada southwestward to central Alabama in the United States. The range crosses three countries: Canada, the United States, and the French overseas collectivity of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon.
Mount Mitchell in North Carolina is the highest peak in the Appalachian Mountains at 6,684 feet. It is also the highest point in the United States east of the Mississippi River.
The geological processes that formed the Appalachian Mountains began at least 1.1 billion years ago with the collision of the cratons Laurentia and Amazonia during the Grenville Orogeny. The mountains were shaped by four major mountain-building events, with the final collision forming the supercontinent Pangea about 270 million years ago.
The name Appalachian derives from a Native American village near present-day Tallahassee, Florida, whose name the members of the Narvaez expedition transcribed as Apalchen or Apalachen in 1528. Spanish cartographers later applied the name to the mountain range itself, with the first map showing the name appearing in 1562 and the first map applying it to the mountains appearing in 1565.
The Appalachian Mountains contain major deposits of anthracite coal in northeastern Pennsylvania and bituminous coal across several states including West Virginia, Kentucky, and Virginia. The 1859 discovery of commercial petroleum in the Appalachians of western Pennsylvania launched the modern U.S. petroleum industry, and more recently the Marcellus Shale and Utica Shale formations have yielded significant natural gas deposits.
The Appalachian Trail is a 2,175-mile hiking trail running from Mount Katahdin in Maine to Springer Mountain in Georgia. The International Appalachian Trail extends the route into the Canadian portion of the range through New Brunswick and Quebec.