The Appalachian Mountains are the main chain of high mountain ranges that stretch along the eastern side of North America from Canada through the United States. The Appalachian Mountains are mostly moderately high ranges separated by long, narrow basins. Even the summits of the Appalachians are forested. This makes them different from the Rocky Mountains, which contain long ranges of very high, pointed peaks and even glaciers.

The name Appalachians comes from the 16th century and Spanish explorations from Florida. Under the leadership of Spanish conquistador de Vaca, an expedition came across a Native American village near Tallahassee, Florida whose name they turned into something they could more easily say: Apalachee.

As maps were made the map makers used the term to describe the mountains they found to the north of Florida. That is why it is the fourth oldest surviving European place name in the United States.

Farther north it was given other local names by the colonists, such as the Alleghenies. But during the 19th century the word Appalachians came to be used for the whole mountain system.

The Appalachians are the oldest mountains in America. What we see today are the mere stumps of mountains once as grand as the Rockies, that time, rivers and ice have worn down to rounded ridge after rounded ridge. They are a very long mountain chain – over 1500mi/2300km long and About 300mi/500km wide, and, even though they are much lower than the Rockies (the average height is 3000ft/1000m ND the tallest – Mount Mitchell in North Carolina at 6684ft/2037m), they made a formidable barrier to the movement of immigrants in previous centuries. The ridges, and the valleys between, tell of how they were formed nearly 470 million years ago. At that time the rocks that were to become the Appalachians were flat layers that had been formed in ancient oceans. There were layers of sandstone, layers of shale and some layers of coal. Great rivers ran across this land from east to west. Then the land was squeezed from two sides as the Earth’s crust shifted. It folded the level rocks into mountains, and made ridges and valleys. But the rivers cut down and kept their courses, so that the long ridges became cut through by gorges, which today we call water gaps.

The land was worn down again then uplifted once more. Last of all, the northern part was overwhelmed by ice in the Ice Age, and its summits scoured, and it valleys scraped out. Later these would become round and finger lakes. At the end of the Ice Age, the weather broke down the rocks and created soil, and slowly plants came back into this mountain land, and eventually forests regrew to cover it all from valley bottom to ridge top. Down the centre is a long valley, called the Great Appalachian Valley. This is occupied by many of the great rivers who make winding, or meandering paths before cutting through the ridges on their way to the Atlantic Ocean or the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. The Appalachians are also known as the Eastern Continental Divide, for here is the eastern edge of rivers flowing to the Mississippi.

To each side of the true mountains are high plateaus in which rivers have cut deep gorges. This is very rugged country, and that is why it is included with the main mountains. The Catskill Mountains and Allegheny Plateau (which continues south as the Cumberland Plateau as far as northern Alabama) are all part of this. Perhaps most famous of all the features of the Appalachian Mountains is the Appalachian Trail, a 2,175-mile (3,500 km) summit hiking trail that runs from Mount Katahdin in Maine to Springer Mountain in Georgia.

Today the Appalachian Mountains are still almost entirely forested. It is not a harsh land like the Rockies, but all the same it is a surprisingly difficult land. This land was only suited to the toughest of peoples. That is why many of the people who came to the Appalachians in the early years of colonization and again just after the Revolution, became the stuff of legend. Who has not heard of Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, for example? But for the most part it was peopled by hardy fold who lived and died with hardly a trace. Their lands and lives were more or less isolated from the rest of the world by the mountains they lived in. They developed a unique culture and often became nicknamed as hillbillies for their unusual ways, lack of education and poverty. They became known for moonshine (whisky), subsistence farming, quilting, bees, duelling, banjos, superstitions and much more.

When the American Revolution swept over the nation, it more or less passed the people of Appalachia by. Important battles such as Harpers Ferry took place in and around the Appalachians, but the almost impossible landscape kept most battles away. So it is not surprising that the people who lived here were less concerned with the wider America than with their local world of family, neighbour, church, grist mill, country store and country town. The communities survived by being tightly knit and different. In 1873 Will Wallace Harney called the Southern Appalachians “A Strange Land and Peculiar People’, and that label has stuck.