Where's the Appalachian Mountains?

Short answer

• The Appalachian Mountains are in eastern North America. They run for almost 2,000 miles (about 3,200 kilometers) from the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador in the northeast to central Alabama in the southwest. In the United States they pass through New England, the Middle Atlantic states, and the southern states as far as Alabama, forming a long highland barrier between the eastern Coastal Plain and the Interior Lowlands. The highest peak is Mount Mitchell in North Carolina, at 6,684 feet (2,037 meters). The Appalachian Trail is not the same thing as the mountains: it is a footpath of more than 2,190 miles that follows part of the range from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine.

The short answer on a map

The Appalachians are not a single narrow ridge. They are a system, a broad belt of highland country that in places is 100 to 300 miles wide. That width explains why two maps of the Appalachians can look slightly different. A map that shows only the high ridges looks thinner than a map that also includes the dissected plateau to the west and the foothills to the east. Both show the same system, but they draw its edges by different rules.

The system runs southwest to northeast. Its southern end is sometimes described as northern Alabama and sometimes as central Alabama, because the highland country fades into lower hills rather than stopping at a sharp line. Britannica puts the southern end in central Alabama, and this article follows that wording. The northern end reaches the island of Newfoundland, in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, and also includes ranges in Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. The Appalachians are therefore an international system, not only an American one, even though most of the famous peaks, parks, and trail miles that American readers know are in the United States.

The Appalachians also sit inland from the Atlantic coast, not on the coastline itself. Between the mountains and the sea lies the Coastal Plain, a lower and flatter belt. To the west of the mountains lie the Interior Lowlands. Britannica describes the Appalachians as a natural barrier between those two lowland regions, and that barrier role shaped settlement, roads, and trade for centuries.

Which states and provinces do the Appalachian Mountains pass through?

Working from northeast to southwest, the Canadian portion includes Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. The United States portion, following the main highland belt, includes Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama.

Three notes keep that list honest. First, not every state is crossed by high peaks: New Jersey and Maryland are crossed mainly by ridges and valleys, and Kentucky is touched mainly on its eastern edge, where the Appalachian Plateau reaches into the state. Second, Delaware and the District of Columbia sometimes appear in very broad lists, because the wider physiographic division includes lowland sections near them, but no mountain country in the ordinary sense runs through them. Third, Ohio is a similar boundary case: the Appalachian Plateau extends into eastern Ohio, but the high ridges most people picture do not run through Ohio. State counts differ because definitions differ, not because the mountains move.

The five divisions, in plain language

Geographers divide the Appalachian system into provinces, large regions with a shared landform character. Different sources group those provinces slightly differently, but the five divisions named in most general accounts, and the five this article uses, are New England, the Middle Atlantic portion, the Blue Ridge, the Ridge and Valley, and the Appalachian Plateau. The United States Geological Survey uses closely related province names: the New England province, the Blue Ridge province, the Valley and Ridge province, and the Appalachian Plateaus province, alongside the Piedmont and the Saint Lawrence Valley provinces.

1. New England

The New England division covers the northern United States portion of the system. It includes the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the Green Mountains of Vermont, the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts and Connecticut, and the Taconic Mountains along the New York border country. This is rugged, glaciated country, with sharp summits, exposed rock, and many lakes. Mount Washington in New Hampshire, at 6,288 feet, and Mount Katahdin in Maine, at 5,268 feet (1,606 meters), are its best known high points, and several White Mountain summits rise above 5,000 feet. Mount Katahdin is also the northern end of the Appalachian Trail, and geologically New England is the northern end of the same system.

2. The Middle Atlantic portion

The Middle Atlantic portion is the central part of the system, running broadly from New York through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland into Virginia and West Virginia. This is a useful general name for the middle of the range, rather than a single USGS province name. On the ground it is a mix of the ridges and valleys described below and the plateau country to the west. The Catskill Mountains of New York sit in this central portion, and the Allegheny Mountains rise in southwestern New York and cover parts of western Pennsylvania, western Maryland, and eastern Ohio before merging into the southern region, as Britannica describes them. This is where the Appalachians are most visibly a barrier with gaps: rivers cut through the ridges at water gaps, and those gaps became routes for roads, canals, and railways, with towns growing where a gap, a valley, and a river met.

3. The Blue Ridge

The Blue Ridge is the easternmost high ridge of the southern and central Appalachians, and it is the division most people picture when they think of blue layered mountains fading into haze. It begins in southern Pennsylvania and runs through Virginia and western North Carolina, with extensions into the northwestern tip of South Carolina and the northeastern corner of Georgia. It is a narrow, high, and continuous ridge compared with the broader plateau to the west. The Black Mountains of North Carolina, part of the Blue Ridge, hold Mount Mitchell, the highest peak in the whole system. The Great Smoky Mountains, on the Tennessee and North Carolina border, are part of the Unaka Mountains, which Britannica places in the southern region alongside the Blue Ridge. The blue color is not rock color. It comes from the way forested ridges, moisture, and light interact over distance, so that each farther ridge looks paler and bluer than the one in front of it.

4. The Ridge and Valley

West of the Blue Ridge lies the Ridge and Valley division, sometimes written as Valley and Ridge. The United States Geological Survey describes this province as the area between the Blue Ridge province on the east and the Appalachian Plateau province on the west. Its rocks are Paleozoic carbonate and clastic rocks that were folded and thrust faulted during the Alleghanian orogeny, the last great mountain building episode described in the geology section below. In plain language, the rock layers were squeezed, bent, and pushed over one another, and erosion then wore away the softer layers faster than the harder ones. The result is the pattern the name describes: long, parallel ridges of resistant rock separated by valleys carved in softer rock. The Great Appalachian Valley is the most famous valley in this division, a long, low corridor whose local names change from state to state: the Kittatinny, Cumberland, Shenandoah, and Tennessee valleys are all parts of it. Caves are another signature here. Where the rocks are limestone, water slowly dissolves them and opens underground passages. Britannica notes that the chief caverns lie within or near the Great Valley region of Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, and Tennessee.

5. The Appalachian Plateau

The Appalachian Plateau, also called the Appalachian Plateaus province, is the westernmost division. The United States Geological Survey describes it as mostly flat lying to gently dipping upper Paleozoic rocks, in contrast to the folded rocks of the Ridge and Valley to its east. The plateau is not flat in the everyday sense. It is a high, dissected tableland, cut by streams and rivers into deep valleys and steep hillsides, and that stream erosion, rather than folding, gives it its high relief. This division includes the Allegheny Plateau, the Cumberland Plateau, and the Cumberland Mountains, among other sections. The Cumberland Mountains run through eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia, eastern Tennessee, and northern Alabama. Coal country sits largely in this division, because the same upper Paleozoic rocks that form the plateau include coal bearing layers.

The highest peaks, and why the list needs care

The highest peak in the Appalachian system is Mount Mitchell in North Carolina, at 6,684 feet (2,037 meters). Britannica gives that figure, and it is the figure to use. Mount Mitchell is also the highest point in the United States east of the Mississippi River, and it sits in the Black Mountains, in the Blue Ridge division.

The next peaks in the conversation are usually Kuwohi and Mount Washington, but they hold different records, so they should not be ranked against each other without saying what the ranking is for. Kuwohi, in Great Smoky Mountains National Park on the Tennessee and North Carolina border, is the highest point in the park and the highest point on the Appalachian Trail, at 6,643 feet on the National Park Service rounded figure. Its traditional Cherokee name, Kuwohi, was formally restored in 2024, after the peak had appeared on federal maps for generations as Clingmans Dome. Older maps and guides will still say Clingmans Dome; both names refer to the same summit. Mount Washington, at 6,288 feet, is the highest peak in New Hampshire and in the northeastern United States, and its summit stands above treeline. Mount Katahdin, at 5,268 feet (1,606 meters), is the highest peak in Maine and the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. Britannica describes it as a great monadnock, a lone hill of resistant bedrock rising from lower country.

Two cautions belong in any peak list. Heights change slightly when remeasured, so 6,643 feet in one source and 6,644 feet in another differ by rounding, not by contradiction. A system record should also not be confused with a state record: Mount Mitchell is both, but most state high points are not system records.

Geology: how old are the Appalachian Mountains, and why are they so low?

The Appalachians are among the oldest mountain systems on Earth that are still standing as mountains. That needs unpacking, because the rocks are older than the mountains in one sense and younger in another. Some rocks in the system are more than a billion years old, formed during the building of the supercontinent Rodinia. The mountain chain itself, however, was built much later, during the Paleozoic Era, in a series of collisions called orogenies. An orogeny is a mountain building episode, a long period when plates collide, crust thickens, and rock is folded, faulted, and metamorphosed.

The United States Geological Survey, in its work on Paleozoic orogens in New England, recognizes five major episodes in that region: the Taconian (455 to 442 million years ago), the Acadian (423 to 385 million years ago), the Neo-Acadian (366 to 350 million years ago), a Late Pennsylvanian episode (300 to 290 million years ago), and the Alleghanian (280 to 260 million years ago). For a general reader, three names carry most of the story. The Taconic orogeny, in the Ordovician Period about 480 to 440 million years ago, began when the Iapetus Ocean, an ancient ocean that once lay where the Atlantic now lies, closed and an island arc collided with the eastern edge of North America. The Acadian orogeny, in the Devonian Period, added more crust in the north. The Alleghanian orogeny, in the late Carboniferous to Permian Periods, was the final great squeeze, when North America collided with North Africa as the supercontinent Pangaea assembled. Britannica describes that Alleghanian collision in the same terms.

After the Alleghanian orogeny, the story is mostly erosion. Pangaea later broke apart, the Atlantic Ocean opened, and the Appalachians were left on a quiet continental margin, far from an active plate boundary. Without new collisions to push them up, they were worn down by water, wind, ice, and gravity for more than 200 million years. That is why they are lower and rounder than the Rocky Mountains, which are much younger and still shaped by active tectonics. The Appalachians were once much higher than they are now, but the exact height of the original range cannot be recovered from the rocks alone, because the upper parts of the ancient mountains have eroded away. Any article that gives a precise original height for the Appalachians should be treated with caution.

The age of the Appalachians also explains their rocks. In simplified form, the Blue Ridge contains old metamorphic and igneous rocks deformed during the collisions, the Ridge and Valley contains folded sedimentary rocks laid down in ancient seas, and the Plateau contains flatter lying sedimentary rocks, including coal bearing layers.

The Appalachian Mountains are not the Appalachian Trail

This is the most useful distinction in the whole article, because the two names are confused constantly. The Appalachian Mountains are a geological system, about 2,000 miles long, from Canada to Alabama. The Appalachian Trail is a footpath, more than 2,190 miles long, from Georgia to Maine. The trail runs through the mountains, but it is not the mountains, it does not cover the whole range, and it is far younger than the range it crosses.

The trail was fully connected in 1937, according to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, the nonprofit organization charged with protecting, managing, and advocating for the trail. It was designated a National Scenic Trail under the National Trails System Act in 1968, and it is a unit of the National Park System. The Conservancy describes it as the longest hiking only footpath in the world, and it says the length changes slightly from year to year, because sections are relocated for sustainability and remeasured with more precise methods. A reader who sees the trail given as 2,190 miles in one source and about 2,197 miles in another is therefore not seeing an error. The honest way to quote the length is as more than 2,190 miles, with a note that the exact figure changes.

The trail passes through 14 states: Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Its southern terminus is Springer Mountain in Georgia, and its northern terminus is the summit of Katahdin in Maine. Notice what is missing. The trail does not go to Alabama, the southern end of the mountain system, and it does not go to Canada, the northern end. It also does not go to South Carolina, Kentucky, or Ohio, even though those states touch the mountain system. A hiker on the trail is seeing a long slice of the Appalachians, not the whole Appalachians.

The trail is also a different kind of thing from a mountain range. A range is made by geology. A trail is made by people: planned, built, marked, maintained, and protected. The Conservancy notes that the trail is marked by white rectangles, called blazes, with rock piles called cairns above treeline, and maintained largely by volunteers through trail clubs working with the National Park Service, the Forest Service, and the Conservancy. A thru-hiker, someone who walks the whole trail in 12 months or fewer, typically takes about six months, according to the Conservancy.

Human history in brief

People have lived in and traveled through the Appalachians for far longer than any European map of the range. The National Park Service, in its account of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, describes Appalachia as known for its rich cultural history from the Cherokee and Appalachian people who called the place home. The mountains were not empty land waiting to be discovered. They were home, hunting ground, farmland, and sacred ground for Indigenous peoples long before European settlement, and Cherokee connections to places such as Kuwohi continue into the present, as the restoration of that name shows.

European settlement met the Appalachians as a barrier. Britannica puts the point plainly: the range formed a natural barrier between the Coastal Plain and the Interior Lowlands, and it played a vital role in settlement and development. Early expansion westward was slowed by rugged terrain, and settlers moved through water gaps and valleys rather than straight over the ridges. Britannica notes that settlers, particularly Germans and Scotch-Irish, often followed water gaps into the interior, and that isolation helped foster distinctive cultural traditions in the southern highlands, including handicrafts, ballads, and folklore. That isolation should not be overstated. The mountains were never sealed off: they were crossed by traders, hunters, soldiers, and migrants from the start, and their valleys were corridors as well as barriers.

The mountains also shaped work. Timber and coal became major industries in the Appalachians, and Britannica pairs those industries with the challenges they brought, including environmental deterioration and economic hardship in some areas. The conservation response to that working history is part of the modern Appalachian story: national parks, national forests, and the protected corridor of the Appalachian Trail itself. Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which the Park Service describes as one of the most biodiverse places in the world, straddling the Tennessee and North Carolina border in the southern Appalachians, is the best known example, but the protected landscape is much wider than one park.

Ecology in brief: why the Appalachians are so alive

The Appalachians are famous among biologists for diversity, and the reason is a mix of age, latitude, elevation, and refuge. The range runs for 2,000 miles from north to south, so it spans many climates. It also rises from low valleys to peaks above 6,000 feet, so a short climb can move a traveler through several forest types. During the ice ages, the southern Appalachians were not covered by glaciers in the way the north was, so they served as a refuge where species could survive and diversify while northern country was under ice.

Britannica sketches the pattern in its account of Appalachian plant and animal life. Northern areas feature conifers such as red spruce and balsam fir, along with northern hardwoods such as sugar maple, beech, birch, and oak. Southern areas are rich in deciduous forests with trees such as hickory, poplar, walnut, and sycamore, and flowering shrubs such as rhododendron, azalea, and mountain laurel are prominent. On the animal side, Britannica lists black bears, white-tailed deer, wild boar, foxes, raccoons, and beavers as common animals, and notes that the Great Smoky Mountains alone support around 200 varieties of birds. Large mammals such as bison, elk, and wolves have largely disappeared from the region, although elk have returned to some northern mountains and moose are found in the northernmost regions, according to the same account.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park gives the clearest single example. The National Park Service says more than 22,000 documented species call the Smokies home, with some found nowhere else, and that the park covers more than 800 square miles in the southern Appalachians. That is the Park Service’s claim about its own park, not a claim extended here to the whole range. Air and water quality and non native species affect the Smokies fragile ecosystems, and logging, farming, and mining have shaped forests across the range, so today’s forests mix old growth remnants with regrown forest.

Common confusions, cleared up

Four confusions account for most wrong answers to the question in the title. First, the Appalachians are not only in the United States. They run from Canada to Alabama, and any answer that stops at Maine in the north and Georgia in the south is describing the trail, not the range. Second, the Appalachians are not the same as Appalachia, the cultural region. Appalachia is a human region, defined by culture and history. The mountain system is a physical region, defined by geology and landforms. The two overlap heavily, but their borders are not identical. Third, the Appalachian Plateau is a division of the Appalachians, not another name for the whole system. A writer who calls the plateau country the Appalachians is using a part for the whole. Fourth, the Adirondack Mountains of New York are sometimes included in a very wide definition of the Appalachian Highlands and sometimes excluded, because they have more in common geologically with the Canadian Shield. This article follows the common general account, which treats the Adirondacks as a neighboring system rather than a core Appalachian division, and it flags the disagreement here so that a reader who meets the wider definition is not confused. A fifth, smaller confusion: the Blue Ridge, Great Smoky, White, and Catskill mountains are all parts of the Appalachians, not rivals to them.

FAQ

Where exactly are the Appalachian Mountains?

They are in eastern North America, running almost 2,000 miles (about 3,200 kilometers) from Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada to central Alabama in the United States. They lie inland from the Atlantic coast, between the eastern Coastal Plain and the Interior Lowlands.

Which states do the Appalachian Mountains run through?

In the United States, the main highland belt runs through Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. The Canadian portion includes Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Wider technical definitions can add fringe areas in Ohio and elsewhere, but the list above covers the main belt.

What is the highest peak in the Appalachian Mountains?

Mount Mitchell in North Carolina, at 6,684 feet (2,037 meters). It is also the highest point in the United States east of the Mississippi River.

How old are the Appalachian Mountains?

Their building began about 480 million years ago, in the Ordovician Period, and continued through several mountain building episodes, including the Acadian and the Alleghanian orogenies. The Alleghanian collision, when North America met North Africa as Pangaea assembled, gave the range its final great squeeze. Some of the rocks in the system are more than a billion years old, but the mountain chain itself was built during the Paleozoic Era and has been eroding ever since.

Are the Appalachian Mountains older than the Rocky Mountains?

Yes, by a wide margin. The Appalachians were built in the Paleozoic Era and have been eroding for more than 200 million years. The Rockies are much younger and have had far less time to erode.

What is the difference between the Appalachian Mountains and the Appalachian Trail?

The mountains are a geological system from Canada to Alabama, about 2,000 miles long and hundreds of millions of years old. The trail is a footpath of more than 2,190 miles from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine, fully connected in 1937 and designated a National Scenic Trail in 1968. The trail follows part of the range, but it does not cover the whole range, and it misses both ends of the geological system.

How long is the Appalachian Trail?

More than 2,190 miles, according to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. The exact figure changes slightly from year to year as sections are relocated and remeasured, so a single fixed figure should not be treated as permanent. The trail passes through 14 states, from Georgia to Maine.

Why are the Appalachians called blue mountains in places?

The blue look comes from forested ridges seen through moist air and light over distance. Each farther ridge looks paler and bluer than the one in front of it. The Blue Ridge division is named for that effect, and the same hazy blue layering is visible across much of the southern Appalachians on humid days.

Sources & references

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, Appalachian Mountains (updated 11 October 2026): extent, endpoints, barrier role, physiography, northern, central and southern regions, highest peaks, Great Appalachian Valley, caves, plant and animal life, settlement and cultural history, timber and coal industries.
• United States Geological Survey, Structural geometry of the Valley and Ridge and Plateaus provinces: Valley and Ridge province between the Blue Ridge and the Appalachian Plateau, folded and thrust faulted Paleozoic rocks, plateau of flat lying to gently dipping upper Paleozoic rocks.
• United States Geological Survey, Paleozoic orogens in New England: Taconian, Acadian, Neo-Acadian, Late Pennsylvanian and Alleghanian episode dates for New England.
• United States Geological Survey, Physiographic Province Maps, Maryland, Delaware and District of Columbia area: Appalachian Plateau and Valley and Ridge and Blue Ridge definitions, relief and rock character.
• Appalachian Trail Conservancy, Appalachian Trail FAQs (updated 17 July 2023): trail fully connected 1937, termini at Katahdin and Springer Mountain, more than 2,190 miles, 14 states, length changes with relocations and remeasurement, white blaze marking, thru-hike timing, volunteer maintenance.
• National Park Service, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Learn About the Park (updated 15 October 2026): more than 22,000 documented species, more than 800 square miles in the southern Appalachians, Cherokee and Appalachian cultural history, fragile ecosystems.
• National Park Service reporting on the restoration of the name Kuwohi, via the September 2024 account of the Park Service statement: Kuwohi as the highest point in the Smokies and on the Appalachian Trail, at 6,643 feet on the rounded figure.