Our High Country!

Sometimes I'm amazed by the scale of the mountainous territory that we do have here in North Carolina. Our mountains are often considered with contempt by people who live in places where the definition of "mountain" is different from what we in the East have figured. Today I visited the Linville Gorge Wilderness Area. The highest peaks there are about 4,200 feet above sea level. Many folk who live where there are mountains three or four times higher than that often don't even think of our high country as mountainous. How wrong they are. The peaks around Linville might only be 4,200 feet in elevation, but a number of them stand 3,000 feet or so above the surrounding territory. I've been on 12,000-foot peaks in the west that stand far less than that above the plateaus on which they sit. And, yet, those are easily considered as mountains, whereas some don't think of the peaks I climbed today as mountains, at all.

In the Linville Gorge Wilderness Area, North Carolina.