The Northern Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee

The Northern Mountains

The Blue Ridge extends northward from Asheville without loosing any of its height or impressiveness, covering 4200 square miles with stony ridges and deep valleys, and overlapping far into Tennessee.

What it looses is tourists. Apart from the elegant resort village of Blowing Rock and the ski resorts near Boone, this region is off the travel industry's radar scope. Instead, it's a place where mountain folk make their living, raising steer and growing black burley pipe tobacco (which they cure outdoors, tied onto sticks), working in small, clean mills, or holding down jobs in the county seat. It's what the rest of the mountains might have looked like if the tourist boom had never happened.

It's beautiful.