Descriptions of Places

 Much of eastern North America consists of landforms characterized by steep sides and flat or rolling tops. The Allegheny Plateau is a particualrly large-scale example: a whole ocean's worth of seafloor sediments uplifted, but still mostly flat, and now dissected by streams. Even in our biggest Eastern mountains from Blue Ridge to the White Mountains, the steepest and most mountainous terrain is on the sides, more recent erosional surfaces, while closer to the top becomes broader and flatter. A hiker can climb steeply past cliffs and waterfalls only to reach hotels and campgrounds at the higher elevations. A huge but subtle instance is the Piedmont. Hardly mountainous at all, it is underlain by metamorphic rock formed during mountain building at an earlier era of the earth's history. Although worn down, the bedrock is still erosion-resistant. The border between the coastal plain and the Piedmont is marked by the "fall-line" of industrial water power fame. Looking at a