Descriptions of Places

The Great Range of the Adirondack High Peaks is one of the most exceptional mountain ranges in the Northeast. Though not to be mentioned in the same breath as the Presidential Range or Katahdin (where I admittedly have never been), it holds its own against Franconia Ridge, and anything else in the region. The terrain is especially fun to hike across. Great traction for boots and fingers can be found on the  rough-surfaced Anorthosite bedrock throughout the High Peaks. The topography of the Great Range in particular lends itself to rock scrambling. It's a ridge of closely-spaced peaks, with steep drops of several hundred feet between them. The trail follows the ridge line, with many challenging spots as it reaches these ups and downs. The steep west-facing ridge of the peak called Gothics is just exposed bedrock for quarter mile. The trail goes straight up it, rising 600 feet from the saddle in that distance. Saddleback Mountain's southwest ridge is even steeper, but shorter. ...

Harriman State Park encompasses a strangely shaped, rugged but not quite mountainous upland in the southeastern New York. Part of the Hudson Highlands section of the Crystalline Appalachian Mountains, its bedrock is a block of ancient, highly deformed precambrian gneisses and other metamorphic rocks, with some granite intrusive structures mixed in. A long history of uplift, erosion and glaciation has shaped it into a peneplain: the tops of the hills are generally flat slabs of bedrock 1100-1300 feet above sea level, higher north and the lower south. Glacial scouring has left little to no soil on the summits. In between them is a gnarly landscape of short but steep cliffs and mountain slopes, talus-strewn valleys, fast-running streams, and swamps. View east from Claudius Smith Den The central and southeastern parts of the park are an area of relatively high elevation and low relief.  Extensive wetlands occur in bottomlands as high as 1000 feet, surrounded by gentle slopes. M...

The Columbia River's watershed includes much of the Northwestern US, and some of Canada, stretching inland to the Continental Divide. It runs south through Washington, and, turning west, it forms the state boundary with Oregon. At Portland, it runs north for a bit, rare for a major river on the North American continent, before turning out to sea. Between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific, its channel slices through volcanic rock, some in the Columbia Plateau of eastern Oregon and Washington, and thousands of feet in the gorge through the Cascade Mountains, just east of Portland.  Its major tributary, the Snake River, traverses a rugged area near the intersection of Idaho, Oregon and Washington, where several granite mountain ranges are interspersed with basalt flows thousands of feet thick. The river forms Hells Canyon, the deepest canyon in North America. Water level is well below 2000 feet here, while the peaks of the Seven Devils range directly on the canyon's east rim a...

The Upper Delaware River drains the western Catskill Mountains, the northeastern part of the Pocono plateau, and the rolling upland in between. It forms the border between New York and Pennsylvania for about 60 miles. These regions, part of the Allegheny Plateau, are underlain by thick, flat-lying Devonian strata of shale, sandstone and some conglomerate. Very generally, the bedrock here grades from shale to sandstone to conglomerate to the northeast and up slope, but with much alternation of layers. The glaciated upland region surrounding the Upper Delaware between Port Jervis and the Catskills is of low relief but somewhat rugged and rocky, ranging consistently from about 1100 to 1300 feet in elevation. The Delaware and its tributaries are deeply incised into the bedrock, with the valley floor level ranging from 600 feet at Barrryville to to 400 feet at Port Jervis. In many places, the river has carved out a sheer cliff several hundred feet tall along one of its banks, such as Hawk...

The Neversink Gorge is surrounded by the gently rolling terrain of the huge, plateau-like shale uplands of Sullivan County, NY. The river cuts steeply through about 600 feet of bedrock, forming a pretty large-scale landform, but it's tucked out of the way in this thinly-populated (except with lakeside cabins), forested area. Where we parked at the top of the gorge, the ground was pretty much flat all around. The forest was dry and open: pitch pines (and maybe red pines?) and scrubby oaks with a low tangle of mountain laurel. There was a lot of wintergreen on the ground. As we walked, the ground gradually began to slope towards the gorge. We dipped into a stream's ravine and saw some hemlocks. Descending into the gorge, things started to get a bit wetter and more diverse, with red and white oaks becoming common, and some other hardwoods mixed in. Towards the bottom, things got quite steep, and all of a sudden there was Rhododendron everywhere. Very near the river, there were s...

Shenandoah National Park encompasses a long stretch of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. The ridge here is high and relatively flat-topped, with steep sides that rise several thousand feet from the fertile lowlands immediately on their east and west flank. The ridge reaches as high as 4,000 feet in a few places, while the valleys are below 1,000 feet. A section of the Crystalline Appalachian Mountains, the Blue Ridge has many rugged outcrops of  ancient gneiss bedrock on its slopes and summits. Jones Mountain ridge seen from Bluff Mountain The upland area surrounding the main ridgeline varies in thickness from a few miles to about 15 miles.  In general, the farther from the ridgeline, the steeper the slopes. Jones Mountain, where we were camping, is a long offshoot, trailing off to the east towards Graves Mill, VA. It rises steeply from the valleys to Bear Church Rock (3,000 ft) and Bluff Mountain (3,500 ft), and then mellows out into a wide rounded ridge that conn...