294 National Geographic Magazine. 



quartzite, and on the Nolichucky river a V-shaped gorge some 

 eight miles long is terraced where the ledges of quartzite are 

 horizontal and is turreted with fantastic forms where the strata 

 are vertical. Where the river valleys are of this sharp cut char- 

 acter in high mountains, the abrupt slopes, cliffs and rocky pin- 

 nacles are commonly still more sharply accented in the heights. 

 The Alpine tourist or the mountaineer of the Sierras would ex- 

 pect to climb from these caiions to ragged combs or to scarcely 

 accessible needle-like peaks. But how different from the heights 

 of the Jungfrau are the "balds" of the Unakas! like the ice- 

 worn granite domes of New England, the massive balds present 

 a rounded profile against the sky. Although composed of the 

 hardest rock, they yet resemble in their contours, the low relief 

 of a limestone area. Broad, even surfaces, on which rocky Out- 

 crops are few and over which a deep loam prevails, suggest 

 rather that one is wandering over a plain than on a great moun- 

 tain; yet you may sweep the entire horizon and find few higher 

 peaks. The view is often very beautiful, it is far-reaching, not 

 grand. No crags tower skyward, but many domes rise nearly to 

 the same heights, and dome-like, their slopes are steepest toward 

 the base. The valleys and the mountains have exchanged the 

 characters they usually bear ; the former are dark and forbidding, 

 wild and inaccessible, the latter are broad and sunlit of softened 

 form, habitable and inhabited. All roads and villages are on 

 the heights, only passing travelers and those who prey upon 

 them frequent the depths. 



These facts of form are not local, they are general : all the 

 streams of the Unaka mountains share the features of the French 

 Broad Canon, while peaks like Great Roan, Big Bald, Mt. Guyot, 

 are but examples of a massive mountain form common through- 

 out the range. 



Thus the Unaka chain presents two peculiar facts for our 

 consideration ; it is cut through by streams rising in a lower 

 range, and its profiles of erosion are convex upward not down- 

 ward. 



If we follow our river's course beyond the Unaka chain into 

 the valley of East Tennessee we shall still find the channel deeply 

 cut ; here and there bottomlands appear, now on one side, now 

 on the other, but the banks are more often steep slopes or verti- 

 cal cliffs from fifty to one hundred feet high. The creeks and 

 brooks meander with moderate fall through the undulating sur 



