Page:The National geographic magazine, volume 1.djvu/364

 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 character in high mountains, the abrupt slopes, cliffs and rocky pinnacles are commonly still more sharply accented in the heights. The Alpine tourist or the mountaineer of the Sierras would expect to climb from these cañons 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 iceworn 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 outcrops are few and over which a deep loam prevails, suggest rather that one is wandering over a plain than on a great mountain; 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 Cañon, while peaks like Great Roan, Big Bald, Mt. Guyot, are but examples of a massive mountain form common throughout 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 downward.

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 vertical cliffs from fifty to one hundred feet high. The creeks and brooks meander with moderate fall through the undulating sursur- [sic]