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Guide to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park

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  • wcu_great_smoky_mtns-2798.jpg
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  • There were two main streams: one (lowing .southwest to the region of Asheville from Pennsylvania and the oilier flowing east from Murphy to Asheville. These joined and went through t. gtip in the Blue Ridge near the present Henderson- ville, across South Carolina and into the Atlantic At that time the Great Smokies formed the divide. The Watauga, Nolichucky, French Broad, Pigeon and Little Tennessee rivers—then headstreams of the Tennessee—gradually gnawed through the divide and drew off their respective sections of the more placid valley streams and diverted them into the Tennessee. After that change, the Blue Ridge became the Eastern Divide. After ages of erosion, the ridges and peaks over a mile in elevation are all that remain of the surface formations of the Cretaceous Peneplain. A study of the rocks of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park reveals formations ranging from Mississippian (the youngest rocks, although they are many millions of years old) back through the Devonian, Silurian, Ordovician. Cambrian and Archean. The Archean are probably among the oldest formed rocks on the globe and are hundreds of millions of years old. The rock formations of the park area include limestones, shales, slates, sandstones, quartzites, con- glomerates, gneisses, schists and, perhaps, some granites. The effect of erosion on the varving formations is the cause of the wide varieties of mountain shape-characteristics in the park area. The coves—such as Cade's, Miller, Tucka- leechee, and West—are regions of Knox dolomite of the Cambrian and Ordovician age. These have been less re- sistanl t,, erosion than the surrounding rocks and, after ages, have been weathered into deep coves. I'be silt washed into the bed of the primeval ocean, before the Appalachian revolution, helped form the present strata of Cambrian shales, sandstones, slates and conglomerates— highly resistant to erosion—which make up the rough ridgeS ol the Chilhowee Mountains, 110
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