About 1,500 miles in the US · Alabama to Maine · highest Mount Mitchell, NC, 6,684 ft
Appalachian Mountains map
The Appalachians run about 1,500 miles from central Alabama to northern Maine and on into Canada. Their highest US peak is Mount Mitchell in North Carolina, 6,684 ft.
Where the Appalachians are
The Appalachians are the old, worn mountains of the eastern US. They begin as low ridges near Birmingham, Alabama, and run northeast in a belt 100 to 300 miles wide through Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, then into Quebec and Newfoundland. The Allegheny Plateau also covers eastern Ohio. Total length in the US is about 1,500 miles; with the Canadian section about 2,000.
The main sub-ranges
- Blue Ridge — Georgia to Pennsylvania; includes the Great Smoky Mountains (Clingmans Dome, 6,643 ft) on the North Carolina–Tennessee line and the Black Mountains with Mount Mitchell, 6,684 ft, the highest point east of the Mississippi.
- Ridge and Valley — long parallel ridges from Alabama to New York; the Shenandoah Valley and the Great Valley run through it.
- Alleghenies and Cumberlands — the plateau country of West Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania; Spruce Knob, 4,863 ft, is the West Virginia high point.
- Catskills and Poconos — New York and Pennsylvania.
- Adirondacks — New York; geologically separate but usually mapped with the Appalachians. Mount Marcy, 5,344 ft.
- Taconics, Berkshires, Green Mountains — the New York–New England border country; Mount Mansfield, Vermont, 4,393 ft.
- White Mountains — New Hampshire; Mount Washington, 6,288 ft, the highest in the Northeast.
- Longfellow and Katahdin — Maine; Katahdin, 5,268 ft, is the northern end of the Appalachian Trail.
Key measurements
- Highest peak: Mount Mitchell, North Carolina, 6,684 ft. Nothing in the range reaches 7,000 ft.
- Appalachian Trail: about 2,190 miles from Springer Mountain, Georgia, to Katahdin, Maine, through 14 states.
- Age: the rocks were folded around 300 million years ago, when Africa collided with North America; the Rockies are less than a quarter as old.
- Rivers that cut through: the Hudson–Mohawk gap, the Delaware Water Gap, the Potomac at Harpers Ferry, the Susquehanna, the New River, and the Cumberland Gap on the Kentucky–Virginia–Tennessee corner.
Cities in and beside the range
Most big eastern cities sit on the coastal plain or the fall line just east of the mountains: Atlanta, Charlotte, Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. Inside the range are Asheville, Knoxville, Chattanooga, Roanoke, Charleston (West Virginia), and Pittsburgh on the western plateau. Birmingham, Alabama, marks the southern end.
How the range shaped the map
For 150 years the Appalachians were the western limit of settlement, and the Proclamation Line of 1763 tried to make them a formal frontier. Several state borders follow the crest: North Carolina–Tennessee runs along the Smokies and Unakas, and Virginia–West Virginia and Virginia–Kentucky follow ridges. West Virginia itself exists because the mountain counties split from Virginia in 1863. The Cumberland Gap, where Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee meet, was the route west for Daniel Boone's Wilderness Road.
Related maps
- US mountain ranges · Highest point in each state.
- Ohio River — the range's western drainage.
- Mason–Dixon Line — crosses the ridges of Pennsylvania and Maryland.
- Southeast · New England · All geography maps.