A Lesson on the Appalachians

Lee and I traveled from north to south through the Appalachians this week, and I now have a new appreciation for them.  The Appalachian mountain range runs from New Foundland in Canada to northern Alabama.  They are the oldest mountains in North America, created over 480 million years ago.  They were at one time as high as the Himalayas.  Today they are fuzzy with vegetation and rounded, due to erosion over millions of years.  But they are beautiful, not with high craggy peaks as in the west, but with wave after wave of mountains and valleys that are at first many shades of green but gradually turn blue in the distance.

 

As you drive from state to state, the Appalachians are known by many names.  In New York, they are the Catskills; in Pennsylvania the Pocono and Allegheny Mountains; in Virginia visitors travel Skyline Drive through Shenandoah National Park; in North Carolina and Tennessee, the Blue Ridge Mountains and Smoky Mountains are best known. There are other names as well.

In our travels over the last week and a half, Lee and I visited several of these areas.  We did not visit Skyline Drive, because we have driven it before.  It is beautiful and worthwhile, and not too far from Washington DC.  Visit it if you ever have the opportunity.

We started with, as already reported, the Alleghenies just west of Gettysburg in Pennyslvania and Williamsport in Maryland.  Our next stop was in the Shenandoah Valley, near New Market.  We chose this location because it was about as close as we could get to Mathias, West Virginia.  Lee has always wanted to visit Mathias, even though he found out a few years ago that he is not directly related to those particular Mathiases.  But that's okay, it gave us the opportunity to go down a road less traveled which proved to be quite beautiful.

If you look at the map above, you may notice that some areas look as if someone took a rake and made a flowing pattern down through the states.  I love this about the Alleghenies - there are long mountain ridges with long thin valleys in between. Mathias WV lies in one such narrow valley, with ridges on each side.  

We came to Mathias, an unincorporated town of less than 2,000.  It had a bank, a school, a post office (below), a church, and two restaurants. 

 It also had an historical log cabin in the form of the Thomas and Susanna Mathias homestead.

 

 

The house was closed, but it looked as if it is opened to visitors on occasion:

It was such a picturesque cabin, I couldn't help but take a ton of photos.

 

 

In front of the cabin is a plaque that tells some of the Mathias story and at the same time a piece of  the story of West Virgina:

 

Lee and I both thoroughly enjoyed our trek into this quiet valley in West Virginia. "Off the beaten track" can be very rewarding.

The next blog will recount our adventures further south.