Geography
The Crab Orchard Mountains rise along the Cumberland Plateau just west of the plateau's Walden Ridge escarpment, north of the Sequatchie Valley, and comprise the southern extreme of the greater Cumberland Mountain range. The mountains are generally composed of Paleozoic sandstones and shales of the Pennsylvanian period, formed roughly 300 million years ago. Although the rocks are much younger than the Precambrian igneous rocks of the Appalachian Mountains to the east, the two mountain systems were both formed during the Appalachian orogeny, when the North American and African plates collided.
Frozen Head State Park is centered along the Flat Fork Valley, a bottomland between Bird Mountain and Old Mac Mountain. The valley's namesake, Flat Fork, rises on the southern slopes of Bird Mountain and follows the entire length of the mountain's southern base before emptying into Crooked Fork near Wartburg. Flat Fork, along with most streams in the park, is drained by the Emory River, the headwaters of which are located along Bird Mountain's northern slopes.
Frozen Head, the park's highest mountain, rises near the center of the park. The mountain crowns a ridge that rises from State Highway 62 to the south, peaks at Frozen Head, and maintains a relatively high ridgeline before intersecting Fork Mountain in the northern section of the park. Most of the park's major mountains run perpendicular to this central ridge.
Read more about this topic: Frozen Head State Park
Famous quotes containing the word geography:
“Ktaadn, near which we were to pass the next day, is said to mean “Highest Land.” So much geography is there in their names.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here;—and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not absent from the chamber where thou sittest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)