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Originally Posted by mm34b
Maybe "Silverwing" will jump in here and give his take on the locations of the Smoky vs. Blue Ridge. Silverwing, are you out there buddy?
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We tend to say "we're headed to the Blue Ridge Mountains" when we ride the Parkway, which extends from northern VA to Cherokee, NC. The Smokies are from Knoxville to points south, certainly including the National Park, and then sort of amorphously around the southern NC/TN area. Now that I've gotten my teeth in the subject, I started looking around. It's kind of neat. I started with the ubiquitous Wikipedia and found some information pulled off the USGS.
I
guess that what we would think of as "The Smokies" is actually a part of the Blue Ridge. "Smoky Mountains" is really an appellation to
describe the area rather than be topograhic, anyway. I was left saying "whoa! cool!!" at some of the other images, particularly the seen-from-space images of the Valley and Ridge section
Bluefield is at the border of West VA/VA. The city actually straddles both states. That thumbprint is Burke's Garden, I believe, which Vanderbilt tried to purchase before settling on the Asheville location for his mansion. The Cumberland Plateau, a feature that I noted when I rode straight across Tennessee last year, looks like this (these pictures are going to kill the dial-up posters. I'm just going to post the link)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f5/Cuesta842.676b-r%2B20saKo%2B20s.png (broken link)
It's funny that, from space, you'd be this miniscule black dot trundling along the interstate, yet you are actually navigating a complex landscape. I-77 runs through Bluefield and that choppy topography. I was thinking "dang! no wonder that road was so crazy" when I rode across Virginia, West Virginia and landed in Marietta, Ohio, just a few months ago.
To get back to the original point: I guess if you want people to understand, in a generic fashion, your trip to the mountains, you'd say "I'm going to the Smokies" when you talk about going to the Nat'l Park, and nasty Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge. The rest can be "the Blue Ridge Mountains" or "the Appalachians", though if you mention the latter you might get round eyes and someone humming the theme to "Deliverance."
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07-27-2006, 03:13 PM
Dirtykj!! Good Idea!
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