APPALACHIA MAY BE THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE.
Are you seeking the Best place to live outside of the big city? Gary Null told his radio audience that Texas was the best for low taxes and good weather. But lower taxes still are found in the Appalachian states as housing values are so low. 'Revenuers' don't come around much if you have a cottage industry, nobody knows about it. The Smokeys, Ozarks, Blue ridge Mts are.interesting hilly, green, many fertile valleys, crevices to farm in. States in southern appalachia have no sizeable freezes. Grow fruit, nuts and vegies. IF there's a city nearby, go to the FARMERS' MARKETS to sell your produce. Your PC plugs in and you can continue to write and monetarize your websites. Use your nuts in FUDGE, fruit cakes, etc, sell those for big money online.
SEE DESCRIPTIONS OF THE AREA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachian_Mountains
http://www.usatoday.com/travel/destinations/10great/2007-08-09-10-great_N.htm
KENTUCKY is lovely: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bplive/2007/states/KY.html
N CAROLINA Boone, N.C. has a built-in air conditioner for the summer
months that turn the rest of the South sticky: the Blue Ridge Mountains,
which keep temperatures at a lovely 75 degrees in August," Tuff says.
"The town, 100 miles north of Asheville, stays hip, thanks to
Appalachian State University. Get jazzed at Espresso News before heading
into the Pisgah National Forest for hiking, mountain biking and rock
climbing. Rafters rollick along the Nolichucky and French Broad rivers."
800-852-9506; visitboone nc.com Share this story:
IMAGINE THIS BEING THE VIEW FROM YOUR SECOND
FLOOR BEDROOM
You can grow enough food for the whole family on a fifty foot square plot. Nuts and Fruits on north side of plot.
BEST 23 TOWNS IN SOUTHERN APPALACHIA
Click on the town to read more or scroll down to see each listed.
* Abingdon, Va.
* Asheville , N.C.
* Blacksburg, Va.,
Radford, Va
* Blowing Rock, N.C.,
Boone, N.C.
* Brevard, N.C.
*Cashiers, N.C., Highlands, N.C.
Chattanooga, Tenn.
* Charlottesville,Va.
*
Dahlonega, Ga.
*
Dalton, Ga.
*
Greeneville, Tenn
*
Greenville, S.C.
* Hendersonville/
Flatrock, N.C.
* Jonesborough,
Tenn.
* Knoxville, Tenn
* Lewisburg, W.Va.
* Lexington, Va.
* Mount Airy, N.C.
* Roanoke, Va.
* Smith Mountain
Lake, Va.
* Staunton, Va.
* Warm Springs/Hot Springs, Va.
* Waynesville, N.C., Maggie Valley, N.C.
Appalachian Christian Village - US News Best Nursing Homes
See an overview of Appalachian Christian Village located in Johnson
City,
TN. Includes ratings on health inspections and staffing, contact
information and ...
health.usnews.com/senior.../appalachian-christian-village-445483 -
Cached
#
Chattanooga, TN
"Water everywhere to swim, fish, or boat."
Best place to live in Blue Ridge Mountains?
Pretend you're ready to retire and you want to go to the Blue Ridge
Mountains. Where's the best place? Roanoke, Virginia? Asheville, NC?
N.
Georgia? Somewhere else? Why and what makes your choice the best place
in
the Blue Ridge?
For the sake of argument, let's say that jobs aren't an issue but money's
relatively tight--you can't spend more than $200,000 on a house and
you care
about things like taxes. Well that's easy. You pay hardly any!
http://www.main.nc.us/sams/blueridge.html
Read upon these green climes starting with THE LITERATURE OF THE REGION
http://www.otterbein.edu/resources/library/libpages/subject/appallit.htm
http://www.ferrum.edu/applit/bibs/fictionbibchild.htm
http://windpub.com/books/Nobody.htm
http://www.leesmith.com/works/columns.php
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/ae/books/s_666715.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharyn_McCrumb
The beautiful Blue Ridge and the majestic Great Smoky Mountains. The
southeast's great vacationland, mecca for Fall "leaf lookers," campers
and
hikers. The summertime escape from the heat of the lowlands. The
source of
gems and minerals for industry and "rockhounds." And home to
increasing
numbers of retirees. These are the historical Southern Appalachians
shared
by the citizens of West Virginia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee
and
Georgia.
Those who have just discovered them as well as those who have been calling
them home for generations, may have wondered how these mountain ranges
that
add so much beauty and tranquillity to our lives were formed and what
this
area of the South was like before they existed. Or were they always
here?
And how about the Ice Age? Did this part of the United States escape
the
deep freeze? Was the land scraped clean by glaciers like that of our
northern neighbors? How high were the tallest peaks before they were
worn
down to their present height? Or are they still "growing" like the
Rocky
Mountains out west?
It is quite possible to come up with reasonable answers to these questions.
Geology is a well established science and geologic deduction can tell
us a
great deal without having to be witnesses to an event. It explains
the
sometimes subtle, sometimes violent, but always powerful forces of
nature
that are impacting on us today just as they were millenia ago. If you
are a
if rock hound," you no doubt already know a great deal about these
forces
and how they can create beautiful minerals and delicate crystals. But
let's
look at the bigger picture and try to interpret the geological signs
we see
about us; signs that might offer some clues as to how these mountains
were
created and what it was like on this part of planet Earth before they
arrived.
TIME
First, go back in time. Way back. Strangely, this is not an easy thing
to
do because we all tend to equate time with what we ourselves can understand
with the help of clocks and calendars (unless we are astronomers and
think
in terms of light years - or geologists who think of "ages" and millenia!).
Forget years. They are far too short a span to measure geologic time.
Start
with a century - 100 years - slightly more than the average lifetime.
One
hundred centuries is 10,000 years. The entire history of mankind stretches
back only about 60 or 70 centuries. This is nothing compared to geologic
history where centuries, even thousands of them, are a mere drop in
an
exceedingly large bucket of time. Here is another way to relate to
the
immense magnitude of geologic time: If we could compress into one year
all
the centuries that have elapsed since the beginning of the Universe,
modern
man would have been on Earth for less than a second!
The author's curiosity about the origins of the mountains in which he
now
resides and his effort as a "rock hound" to understand why the southern
Appalachians are so special, and fascinating, geologically speaking,
is the
reason for this article.
Now transport your thinking back to 46 million centuries ago. This is
the
calculated age of the oldest rocks we've found on Earth. This was when
our
planet was beginning to settle down and pull itself together. The age
of a
layer of rock can be determined by the rate of radioactive decay of
its
mineral content and often, though less accurately, by its fossil content.
Based on this, according to Harry L. Moore in his "Roadside Guide to
the
Geology of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park," we know that the
oldest rocks found in the Blue Ridge mountains are 10 million centuries
old. In fact, most of the rocks in the Appalachians are this old. They
include metamorphic gneisses, schists, some granitic rocks, as well
as
sedimentary rocks which are the youngest. They range in age from 3
to 5
million centuries.
That leaves a time gap of at least 36 million centuries before any of
the
Blue Ridge rocks were even formed.
THE BEGINNING
Try to comprehend what could have been happening during that vast span
of
time - so many centuries that it boggles the imagination.
In fact, we do have a fairly good idea of what was happening. According
to
Norman Cutler Smith, a geologist at the University of North
CarolinaAsheville (College for Seniors), by studying the types of rocks
composing these mountains, geologists have deduced without doubt that
this
particular portion of Earth was definitely under water - the bottom
of a
vast ocean, slowly filling up with sediment and sand. Much of the sediment
was probably volcanic ash thrown into the atmosphere by ancient volcanos
whose vestiges have all but disappeared from this part of North America.
The residue was washed off the land by rain water, streams and rivers.
As the sediment became deeper and deeper, the weight of the material
itself
and the water above created enough pressure to cause the particles
at the
oldest and thus lowest levels to consolidate into a layered, reasonably
solid rock mass, i.e., sandstone, siltstone, limestone; the latter
formed
from calcium carbonate muds and the skeletons of marine life forms.
THE GREAT COLLISION(S)
But something else was happening at the same time. Huge rock masses
(tectonic plates) composed of continents and portions of ocean basins
afloat on the earth's semi-molten mantle, were alternately separating
and
then drifting toward one another. Geologists have long known that at
one
point the continents were bunched together in a massive proto-continent,
dubbed "Pangaea." Recently discovered evidence reveals that the North
American "tectonic plate" (continent) was at one time bordered on the
east
coast by what we now know as South America, on the southwest by Antarctica
and the northwest by Australia. The evidence is based on a contiguous
rock
formation known as the "Grenville Belt" that can be traced from northern
Canada and down the eastern seaboard of the United States only to show
up
once again in Australia as well as on the Antarctica plate. It was
like a
rocky "ribbon" that once tied all these distant continents together
into
one huge land mass.
When continents collide, something has to give. What was happening was
not
unlike compressing a multi-layered piece of water-softened, thick,
soggy
cardboard one side toward the other. The material in the middle has
to go
somewhere so it crumples to form ridges and grooves (mountains and
valleys). Increasing the pressure, forces some sections of the cardboard
to
fold over on itself, crunch up and perhaps even break off in some places.
Like the cardboard, the layers of sediment being steadily squeezed together
were now emerging out of the water and forced upward higher and higher
by
the advancing continents. What had been ocean floor was now becoming
mountain top.
"Orogeny" is the technical name assigned by geologists to the effects
of
the collision of these moving continents that form the crust of our
globe.
The southern Appalachian mountain-building episode, according to Dr.
J.
William Miller, Jr., assistant professor of geology at the University
of
North CarolinaAsheville, consisted of a series of at least three such
events which began 15 million centuries ago and ended about 2.3 million
centuries ago at the end of the Paleozoic time. It culminated in what
is
called the "Appalachian Orogeny".
So what were once layers of sedimentary rock thousands of feet thick
and
comprising the bed of an ocean, began rising up and ultimately formed
peaks
at least as high as the present day Rocky Mountains. Perhaps higher.
Based
on the tremendous volume of material eroded from them and deposited
along
the east coast of the United States, it is estimated that a layer of
rock
as much as 20 miles in thickness has been removed.
THE WEARING DOWN
Then, after a while, give or take a few million centuries, these same
continental plates reversed direction, gave up trying to squash each
other
and began drifting apart, leaving mountainous piles of scrunched up
rock on
the edge of the restless continents: the Appalachian Mountains in North
America, the Pyrenees in Europe and the Atlas Mountains in Africa.
The gap
between North America and Afro-Europe became the Atlantic Ocean.
This plate movement is still going on and the Atlantic is still expanding
at the rate at which fingernails grow: roughly two centimeters per
year!
Now exposed to the atmosphere and the elements, the relentless forces
of
nature began bringing them down. The effects of erosion no doubt kept
pace
with the sporadic structural uplift so that the elevations of the highest
peaks, though certainly greater than today, may never have been so
spectacular as the present day Himalayas. Falling rain, flowing streams
and
rivers, freezing and thawing that produced frost heaving and ice capable
of
shattering huge boulders and cracking apart walls of seemingly solid
rock
did most of the work. Blowing wind and the abrading effect of airborne
rock
particles also contributed to the process. In regions to the north,
moving
glaciers of ice would break down and scrape off the mountain tops and
fill
the valleys with rubble. Everything water, rocks, soil - would work
its way
inexorably to the ocean once again thanks to gravity, nature's gentlest
but
most persistent force.
THE HEATING UP
All this pushing, squeezing and crunching of rock layers had a side
effect:
Heat. The extreme orogenic (mountain-forming) pressures resulting from
the
force of gravity on huge masses of slowly moving rock, generated frictional
heat - many thousands of degrees. This, combined with heat coming from
the
mantle below, caused some of these sedimentary rocks to change
(metamorphose) in form and mineral composition. Sandstone became quartzite.
Limestones were converted into marble, and shales into slates. Molten
material, including the minerals mica, feldspar and quartz, solidified
to
form an extremely tough igneous rock called "granite."
Sometimes the molten feldspar along with other minerals was injected
by the
pressures from below into the older rocks above to form deposits called
"pegmatite dikes." The larger, more spectacular molten intrusions are
being
mined today for their high purity quartz, feldspar, beryl and mica
besides
a variety of precious gem crystals including emeralds, acquamarines,
and
tourmalines.
For visual evidence of what took place way back then, get in your car
and
drive along any modern Appalachian mountain highway. Notice the appearance
of the rock in the walls of the road-cuts. It is such slices through
geologic history that provide perhaps the best testimony to the intense
forces that created these mountains. In contrast, a road-cut in the
plains
of the midwestern states reveals flat or gently dipping layers of rock
strata, clearly a sign that the rolling landscape is due, largely to
erosion glacial or otherwise. But in the southern part of the Appalachian
mountains, in the Blue Ridge, including the Great Smokies, we see at
every
road-cut a striking display of awesome, powerful distortion; graphic
evidence of the tremendous forces of nature that were in play so many
millions of centuries ago. We see layers, no longer flat but twisted
and
convoluted, sometimes even curling back on themselves; some shearing
portions away completely, the missing piece to be found in some other
location. The 1-240 road-cut through Beaucatcher Mountain east of Asheville
is a classic illustration of the result of what was happening way back
then.
The angle of the "layering" (foliation) of metamorphic rocks or "bedding
planes" of sedimentary rocks also provide proof of the mechanism that
created these mountains. Examination of those on the Tennessee side
reveal
formations identical with those on the North Carolina side, with one
notable distinction: Those on the northwestern slopes tilt upward from
southwest to northeast; those on the southeastern side also tilt upward
but
in exactly the opposite direction: from southeast to northwest. This
is
precisely what one would expect from compressing flat land until it
started
to bulge upward in the middle.
Continuing westward across Tennessee into Harlan County, Kentucky we
find
coal deposits among the layers of sedimentary rock. These were the
ancient
wet land marshes and bogs that bordered the coastline of that same
ocean
bed we now enjoy in the form of the mountains of eastern Tennessee
and
western North Carolina. During one of the Appalachian orogenies, these
lowlands laden with living organic material were buried under layers
of
sediment which compacted it into seams of bituminous or "soft" coal.
Up
around Scranton, Pennsylvania layers of bog land were buried to far
greater
depths and compressed by the greater weight of the rock above to the
point
where they metamorphosed into anthracite or "hard" coal.
THE GLACIERS
What role did glaciers play in the formation or shaping of these mountains?
None in the southern Appalachians. The southernmost traces of the last
Ice
Age are well above the Mason-Dixon Line. Moreover, glaciers do not
build
mountains. Rather, they tend to destroy them by eroding their tops
and
filling in the valleys with rocky debris. The southern mountain country
was
spared, although ice fields to the north affected the temperatures
and
precipitation: longer cool cycles brought more rain and snow. This
in
itself contributed significantly to the wearing down of the mountainous
regions of Western North Carolina. It brought frequent and copious
rainfall
which set the stage for the normal, constant forces of erosion resulting
from the flow of streams and rivers. In winter months, it fostered
cracking
due to freezing and thawing. And with it came the scouring effect of
wind.
These same processes continue today - abetted by the ravages of man.
That
is why the Appalachian Mountains, being geologically older, are much
lower
and have gentler slopes compared to the Rockies or the Andes or the
Himalayas. We just got a tremendous head start in the erosion process
- 2.5
million centuries!
TODAY
Let's move forward to relatively recent times: 200 to 165 centuries
before
the present. It is believed that the southern Appalachians had tundra
vegetation and had developed permafrost where the temperatures averaged
below 32°F. In fact, a permanent snowpack may have persisted throughout
the
year in some higher hollows or valleys. Intense freeze-thaw activity
resulted in the development of "block fields", i.e., areas within the
mountains strewn with huge boulders developed from jointed bedrock,
much of
it granite. Alpine tundra herbs and subarctic shrubs persisted above
5,000
feet in elevation. Forests blanketed the hill slopes and valleys at
lower
elevations, below the upper limit of stunted trees.
Between 165 and 125 centuries before the present, there was an increase
in
mean annual temperature and precipitation. Freeze-thaw action reworked
sediments down the unstable mountain slopes. With warming climates,
forests
spread upward to the middle elevations and deciduous tree species (oak,
birch and ash) migrated into the valleys, expanding from areas in the
coastal plain.
By 100 centuries ago, coniferous forests - dominated, as today, by fraser
fir and red spruce - were established on the slopes of the higher ridges;
oak forests spread into the low and middle elevations. Today spruce-fir
forests are found only along the crests of the highest peaks. However,
examples of subarctic plant species are found along cliff faces of
the
higher elevation mountains including Mt. Mitchel, Mt. Le Conte, and
Grandfather Mountain. The block fields, now stabilized, support growths
of
hemlock and hardwood trees.
In the comparatively warm, comfortable climate we presently enjoy, our
mountain slopes abound with flora and fauna: about 2,000 species of
plants
- 130 varieties of hardwoods alone, 50 species of mammals, 39 species
of
amphibians, and over 200 species of birds. (roast DUCK to you!)
Gems, carpentry, hand built homes. Roast duck for dinner? Vegetables, fruits that you grew yourself? Hickory nuts and chestnuts? What's to keep you in the city? Sell the condo. Take the money and buy a farm.
JOEL SKOUSEN the son of writer Cleon Skousen, has list of best places to relocate in USA, WORST, CHEAPEST, LOWEST TAXES
http://www.joelskousen.com/strategic.html
~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~
Our
POSTER is ANITA SANDS HERNANDEZ, Los Angeles Writer, Futurist
and Astrologer. Catch up with her websites TRUTHS
GOV WILL HIDE & NEVER TELL YOU,
also The
FUTURE, WHAT'S COMIN' AT YA! & HOW TO SURVIVE
the COMING GREAT DEPRESSION, and
Secrets of Nature, HOLISTIC, AFFORDABLE HEALING. Also HOW
TO LIVE on A NICKLE, The
FRUGAL PAGE.*
Anita is at astrology@earthlink.net ). Get a 15$ natal horoscope "my money/future
life" reading now + copy horoscope as a Gif file graphic!
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