Appalachian Mountains

• 1. Introduction

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  The Appalachian Mountains stretch 2,050 miles from the island of Newfoundland in Canada southwestward to central Alabama, crossing through three countries along the way. At one point, they once reached heights comparable to the Alps and the Rocky Mountains. Yet today, their tallest peak, Mount Mitchell in North Carolina, tops out at 6,684 feet. What happened to those ancient giants? And why does a mountain range older than the dinosaurs still divide the United States the way it does? This documentary follows the Appalachians from their fiery origins more than a billion years ago through their role as a barrier to westward expansion, a cradle of biodiversity, and a landscape still being shaped by forces both geological and human.

• 2. A Name from Florida

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  In 1528, members of the Narvaez expedition, including Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, were exploring inland along the northern coast of Florida when they encountered a Native American village near present-day Tallahassee. The villagers' name, which the Spanish transcribed as Apalchen or Apalachen, would eventually travel hundreds of miles northward and attach itself to a mountain range the expedition never saw. Pánfilo de Narváez's party entered Apalachee territory on the 15th of June, 1528, and from that contact the Spanish extended the name to the tribe and then the surrounding region spreading well inland to the north. It took cartographers several more decades to link the name to the mountains themselves. The first map to show the word Apalchen appeared in Diego Gutiérrez's 1562 chart; Jacques le Moyne de Morgues's 1565 map was the first to apply the name to the mountain range specifically. Even then, for most of the next three centuries, many Americans called the range the Allegheny Mountains or simply the Alleghenies. In the early 19th century, Washington Irving proposed renaming the entire United States either Appalachia or Alleghania. Today, "Appalachian" ranks as the fourth-oldest surviving European place-name in the United States, and the debate about how to pronounce it still flares between neighbors from Pennsylvania and Tennessee.

• 3. Billion-Year Birth

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  Around 1.1 billion years ago, the craton called Laurentia collided with at least one other craton, Amazonia, helping to assemble the supercontinent Rodinia. That collision folded and faulted rock into a mountain range, the first in a long sequence of ranges that would eventually become the Appalachians. The Blue Ridge Mountains and the Adirondacks both contain rock formations born during this Grenville Orogeny, meaning that hikers in Virginia and New York are walking on some of the oldest exposed geology in North America. Rodinia later broke apart, and the retreating continents opened the Iapetus Ocean, the predecessor of the modern Atlantic. Volcanic activity along those rifting margins, between roughly 600 and 560 million years ago, produced what are now Mount Rogers, Whitetop Mountain, and Pine Mountain in the Blue Ridge. The Catoctin Formation, erupted during the final stages of that rifting and later transformed into Greenstone, offers some of the best surviving evidence of that volcanic chapter. Three distinct mountain-building episodes then followed over the next 500 million years. The Taconic Orogeny, which lasted roughly 60 million years, built much of what is now New England and extended southwest into Pennsylvania. The Acadian Orogeny, between 375 and 359 million years ago, closed the southern Iapetus Ocean. Finally, about 270 million years ago, ancestral North America and Africa collided to form Pangea, raising the Central Pangean Mountains, a continuous chain that also ran through Scotland and the Little Atlas in Morocco.

• 4. Erosion and Uplift

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  By the end of the Mesozoic Era, roughly 240 million years of erosion had worn the Appalachians down to nearly flat plains. No trace of the Alpine-scale heights remained. Uplift during the Cenozoic Era then rejuvenated the landscape, and streams responded by cutting downward into the ancient bedrock with renewed energy. Some streams followed weak layers along old folds and faults. Others cut directly across resistant rock, carving water gaps through ridgelines. The result is a range with no dominant spine of high peaks; instead, the summits across any given section rise to roughly uniform heights, and the ridges and valleys share the same northeast-to-southwest trend. In West Virginia alone, more than 150 peaks rise above 4,000 feet, including Spruce Knob at 4,863 feet, the highest point in the Allegheny Mountains. Pennsylvania holds over sixty summits above 2,500 feet. None of the range's peaks, however, reaches the zone of permanent snow. That distinction between the ancient record and the present modest profile is a direct legacy of those 240 million years of weathering, and it shapes everything from the region's river patterns to the depth of its soils.

• 5. A Barrier to the West

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  The Appalachians run in alternating ridgelines and valleys oriented directly against most east-west highways and railroads. Crossing them has never been simple. During the colonial era and the early years of the United States, this geographic reality was not merely inconvenient; it was decisive in shaping where settlers moved and how quickly the country expanded inland. South of the New River in Virginia, major rivers drain westward through spreading gorges in the Cumberland Plateau, eventually reaching the Ohio and Mississippi before emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. North of the New River, rivers cut eastward through the Blue Ridge and flow toward tidal estuaries, reaching the Atlantic via the Roanoke, James, Potomac, and Susquehanna rivers. The Eastern Continental Divide, which separates waters bound for the Atlantic from those heading for the Gulf, follows the Appalachians from Pennsylvania all the way south to Georgia. Even today, the 96-square-mile archipelago of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, an overseas collectivity of France, sits within the mountain range's geographic footprint south of Newfoundland, making the Appalachians technically part of three countries.

• 6. Coal, Oil, and the Land

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  The 1859 discovery of commercial quantities of petroleum in the Appalachian Mountains of western Pennsylvania launched the modern United States petroleum industry. Coal had been mined there far longer, and the range holds major deposits of two distinct types: anthracite in the folded northeastern Pennsylvania coal region, and bituminous coal across western Pennsylvania, western Maryland, southeastern Ohio, eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia, and West Virginia. Surface coal mining that began in the 1940s transformed large sections of the central Appalachians in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. The mountain-top removal method, in which entire summits are stripped away, continues to threaten wide ecosystems. Early mining was unregulated; research into reclaiming mined land, including work on acid base accounting, was led by West Virginia University in the 1960s and 1970s. West Virginia developed state reclamation standards for coal mines in the late 1960s, and most states introduced protective regulations by the end of that decade. Social and political pressure eventually produced the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977. More recently, discoveries of natural gas in the Marcellus Shale and Utica Shale formations have refocused industry attention on the Appalachian Basin, adding a new chapter to a resource story already centuries old.

• 7. A Living Forest

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  Salamanders, not bears or deer, hold the title of largest animal biomass in the Appalachian forests. Lungless salamanders of the family Plethodontidae live in enormous numbers under leaves and debris on the forest floor, and estimates place their collective weight above that of every other animal class in the region. The north-to-south orientation of the Appalachian ridges and valleys made the range a corridor for species migration during alternating warm and cold periods, producing one of the most biodiverse landscapes in North America. Fraser fir, endemic to the highest parts of the southern Appalachians, rarely grows below 5,500 feet and becomes dominant above 6,200 feet, where it shares a fragile ecosystem with red spruce. Eastern hemlock, by contrast, favors deep shaded valleys, but it faces rapid destruction from the hemlock woolly adelgid, an introduced insect. The American chestnut was virtually eliminated from the forest canopy by the introduced chestnut blight fungus; it survives today only as sapling sprouts growing from roots the fungus cannot kill. European boars were introduced in the early 20th century, and the eastern wolf and North American cougar have been extirpated, allowing white-tailed deer populations to swell and overgraze native plants. The brook trout, still sought by anglers in shaded cool streams, and the colorful darter fish, among the most diverse members of the minnow family, inhabit Appalachian waterways whose exceptional freshwater biodiversity reflects the same long isolation and geographic stability that shaped the forests above them.

• 8. Trail and Future

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  The Appalachian Trail runs 2,175 miles from Mount Katahdin in Maine to Springer Mountain in Georgia, tracing a path over or near much of the range and drawing hikers from around the world. Its Canadian extension, the International Appalachian Trail, continues the route through New Brunswick and Quebec, reaching into the same ancient geology that defines the whole system. The open summits called Appalachian balds in the southern mountains, some maintained for millennia by Native American burning practices and later by grazing livestock, are now being reclaimed by trees as grazing has declined. In the north, the summits of the White Mountains, the Adirondacks, and Mount Katahdin carry true alpine tundra, kept clear not by human activity but by the same harsh winter storms that shaped them since the last ice ages. The Chic-Chocs of Quebec host the only population of reindeer south of the St. Lawrence River. Beaver, nearly wiped out for their pelts, are returning to Appalachian waterways in numbers large enough to reshape habitats through dam-building. The range that once formed part of a continuous chain stretching from Morocco to Scotland continues to change, eroding slowly, rewilding in some places and being mined in others, its 1.1-billion-year story nowhere near its final chapter.