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Denver and Colorado Springs are in between the Great Plains and the Rockies. They're both technically on the plains with the Rockies right behind them hence the Front Range.
Pretty much every town and city in the mountainous part of Colorado is on a striking transition zone. Elevation changes obviously alter the vegetation composition, but the effect is more pronounced in Colorado (and WY) than it is on the west coast or in the eastern US because the climate is so harsh only a couple species of plants can survive in any given area. So what ends up happening is you quickly transition from one monoculture forest to another as you shift from the north slope of a mountain to the west side on top of the changes you get from elevation differences.
We went camping a couple weeks ago. Our campsite was mostly all aspen, all about the same age, which was the result of a fire burning a stripe of the side the mountain probably about 100 years ago. To the west of the campsite the forest was almost exclusively Douglas Fir. To the east of the campsite, the forest was exclusively spruce. Dropping 100 ft in elevation, it was exclusively sagebrush. Dropping down to the stream lower, exclusively grass.
I think it's the ability to quickly transition lots of various vegetation types rather than the actual beauty within any given forest that draws people to Colorado.
There probably is a slight difference (like less trees to the west), but the first view is from May and the second view is from February, when trees are bare and the grass is brown in most of the South.
It is a lot flatter to the west and it is almost treeless. In fact, OKC was the westernmost extent of the crosstimbers forest naturally. It was during the 1930s dust bowl that trees were planted farther west.
Going east though, I wouldn't say it looks like Arkansas. Crosstimbers trees are short and shrubby and going east on I-40, you don't get into full-sized trees until around Muskogee, OK and even then, those trees are puny compared to the ones east of Fort Smith, AR.
Charlotte's metro is a little bit of a transition. In its western suburb of Gaston County (where I live), it starts getting a bit hilly. I can see Crowder's Mountain from my neighborhood and Kings Mountain beyond that. We're just at the start of the foothills. South and east of Charlotte, it's pretty flat.
Albuquerque sits up against the Sandia and Manzano Mountains on the east and, across the Rio Grande, borders the northern region of the Chihuahuan desert on the west. There are visible mountains to the north, the Sangre de Cristos near Santa Fe, and the Jemez Mountains to the northwest.
Columbus Ohio is flat and to the west is all flat, but Appalachians start a little east.
Also idk what the regions would be called, but I don't think people realize how hilly the NYC area can be. Manhattan where tourists go and basically all of Long Island (including Brooklyn and Queens) is quite flat. Manhattan has some small changes in elevation below Central Park where tourists would see. But northern parts of Manhattan, already start some real topography that extends into the Bronx and just continues on. NJ across the Hudson has some extreme hills and then further into NJ it's actually quite hilly. NYC is definitely a transition area, but it's rarely acknowledged by people who don't leave the tourist areas.
Once you get past those parts of NJ, it turns flat again for a few miles. After those few miles, the rest of NJ is all hilly or mountainous. I think this view kinda shows how it stays flat for a few miles, then just jumps up into cliffs around West Orange.
I don't know Westchester County as well, but I do know that right above like Midtown Manhattan, the Hudson Valley starts as an actual valley with steep cliffs on both sides.
Honestly, if you stay on SR-76, SR-87, or I-8 for 1.5 hrs from the coast to the inland desert, you'll probably see more geographies than most states have.
It is a lot flatter to the west and it is almost treeless. In fact, OKC was the westernmost extent of the crosstimbers forest naturally. It was during the 1930s dust bowl that trees were planted farther west.
There are a couple of bands of the Crosstimbers further west than OKC that are natural. And there have always been trees in creekbeds in western OK but there was a lot of tree planting in western Oklahoma in the 1930s. These shelter belts were long rows of trees planted on section lines.
The shelter belts are slowly disappearing but can still be seen in some places. I've gone by the first shelter belt ever planted in the USA. They are maintaining it. It is by Willow, OK.
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