Regions
The country,
range by range.
Three provinces of the Appalachians meet down here, and the state lines ignore all of them. So the atlas goes by landscape. Pick a province, then a range.
Province
The Blue Ridge
The high, old mountains of metamorphic and igneous rock, from the Cohuttas in Georgia through the Smokies and the Unakas. Most of the named ranges in the atlas belong here.
- Roan Highlands
- Nantahala Mountains
- Cohutta Mountains
- Great Smoky Mountains
- Unicoi Mountains
- The Blue Ridge Escarpment
- The Georgia Blue Ridge
- Great Balsam Mountains
- Black Mountains
Province
The Ridge and Valley
Folded sedimentary rock west of the Blue Ridge: the Great Valley of East Tennessee and northwest Georgia, with its limestone floors, caves, and long sandstone ridges.
- The Great Valley
- Armuchee Ridges
- Chickamauga Valley
- White Oak Mountain
- Clinch Mountain
- Bays Mountain
- Powell Valley
- Holston Valley
Province
The Cumberland Plateau
The southern end of the Appalachian Plateau: a tableland of nearly horizontal sandstone and shale, dissected into deep gulfs and gorges, with the Sequatchie Valley splitting it lengthwise.
- Cumberland Plateau
- The South Cumberland
- Lookout Mountain
- Pigeon Mountain
- McLemore Cove
- Lookout Valley
- Sequatchie Valley
- Walden Ridge
- Crab Orchard Mountains
- Cumberland Mountains
- The Obed and Emory Gorges
A note on boundaries
Few of these landscapes have surveyed edges. Where a range ends and the next begins is a matter of usage, geology, and sometimes argument, and some names describe different levels of the same thing: the Roan Highlands sit inside the Unaka Mountains, which sit inside the Blue Ridge. The atlas keeps those relationships rather than flattening them into tidy, equal units. Each page says how its region is being defined.