Appalachian Mountains

The Appalachian Mountains are a long chain of mountains in eastern North America. The chain stretches about 2,000 miles, from the island of Newfoundland in Canada down to central Alabama in the United States. That is about the driving distance from New York to Denver. The highest peak is Mount Mitchell in North Carolina, which rises 6,684 feet above sea level.

The Appalachians are very old. They first formed about 480 million years ago, when the land that is now North America crashed into other ancient continents. The crash pushed up huge mountains that were once as tall and jagged as the Himalayas are today. Over hundreds of millions of years, wind, rain, and rivers wore them down. The rounded, forested ridges you see now are the worn-down roots of those ancient giants.

Because the mountains are so old, their rocks are old too. Some are more than a billion years old. The Appalachians also hold huge amounts of coal, which formed from ancient swamp plants that were buried and squeezed for hundreds of millions of years. Coal mining has shaped life in states like West Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania for over a hundred years.

The Appalachians are not one single ridge. The chain is made up of many smaller ranges, including the Blue Ridge, the Great Smoky Mountains, the Alleghenies, and the White Mountains of New England. The forests that cover them are some of the most varied in the world. A single section of the Great Smokies has more kinds of trees than all of Europe. Black bears, white-tailed deer, and hundreds of kinds of salamanders live in these forests. Scientists sometimes call the region a "salamander capital," because more species of them live there than almost anywhere else on Earth.

People have lived in the Appalachians for thousands of years. The Cherokee, Shawnee, Haudenosaunee, and many other Native nations made their homes in these mountains long before Europeans arrived. Later, the steep ridges slowed down westward settlement by colonists, until explorers found gaps through the mountains in the 1700s.

Today, the Appalachian Trail runs along the spine of the chain. It is a hiking path that stretches about 2,190 miles from Georgia to Maine. A few thousand people try to hike the whole thing each year. Most take five to seven months to finish. Only about one in four of them makes it all the way.