From a very broad perspective, there are only two main sections of mountains in the contiguous United States: the west and the east. The west is the entire western third of the country, a largely mountainous area featuring the Cascade Range, the Sierra Nevada, the Rocky Mountains, and other nearby ranges. The east is simply the low but sprawling Appalachian Mountains. Between these two large areas the terrain is much more subdued, and can be safely ignored for the purposes of the current analysis.
Elevation is the most obvious difference between the ranges of the west and the Appalachians of the east, and it is also the reason that many western hikers are probably not even bothering to read this page. "Why should I climb a peak whose summit is lower than the city I live in?" they ask. It is true that in the east, a high peak is one over 4000 feet, one over 5000 feet is very high, and one over 6000 feet is simply monstrous. Out west, a peak needs to be over 10,000 feet high to be taken seriously in most places, most states feature peaks over 13,000 feet, and 14,000 feet is the mark of a true giant. Large cities like Colorado Springs, CO and Santa Fe, NM are higher than all but a handful of Appalachian summits.
However, the real measure of a mountain is the elevation gained in reaching its summit rather than its height above sea level. The trailhead-to-summit vertical feet can often be greater on a 5000-foot Appalachian peak than on a 13,000 foot Rocky Mountain giant. The only big difference is that the air is thinner when hiking from 10,000 to 13,000 feet than it is when doing the same from 2,000 to 5,000, causing trouble for those not acclimatized. However, life-threatening altitude sickness is extremely rare at elevations below 15,000 feet, so once a hiker is used to the thinner air, the elevation difference really isn't that important at all.
Instead, the principal difference between east and west is the overall mix of the related factors of vegetation, terrain, and weather. Broadly, there are three kinds of mountain in the United States: the forested, in the east, the dry, which dominate the west, and the wet, a minority out west.
Eastern mountains--the Appalachians--are forested mountains par excellence. Except for scattered open ledges, some rare open meadows, and even rarer tiny tracts of above-timberline terrain, they are totally blanketed by thick green forest, making views a treasured rarity and hiking trails very important for getting around. Only the very highest summits of the Northern Appalachians have a timberline, where it is a relatively sudden transformation from dense forest to open tundra.
Almost all western mountains--the Rockies, the Intermounain West, and the Sierra Nevada--are dry mountains. They rise from parched, treeless plains, feature a band of open, low-density forest on their slopes, and very often have extensive areas of tundra above the trees. This means that in addition to the timberline where the trees thin out to tundra above, there is a lower timberline where the trees thin out to dry plains below. Both timberlines are often gradual and indistinct. Of course, these mountains aren't really that dry, since they actaully get more rain and snow than the nearby desert-like lowlands, snagging passing clouds with their elevation and wringing mositure out of them. In all these "dry" mountains it seems to thunderstorm every single afternoon in summer, and they can get fantastic amounts of snow, but the lack of luxuriant vegetaion, the open and sparse forests, and the truly dry surrounding land all make the term "dry" appropriate.
Wet mountains are those where it rains so much that not only are the mountains thickly forested, but up high the huge amounts of snow form glaciers. Only the Cascade Range and the Olympic Mountains, both in the Pacific Northwest, are truly wet, where the permanent snowline is almost the same as the timberline, meaning that shortly after climbing up out of the luxuriant forest, you might encounter glaciers. There are areas of above timberline talus and meadow in the wet mountains, but they are so dominated by rain, snow, and ice they truly become a category unto themselves.
These huge generalizations ignore certain subtleties, of course. For example, the northern Rockies are often very forested, and sometimes pretty wet, and all the Appalachians are quite wet as well as forested. But, broadly, it is true that westerners coming east will be dismayed by the view-blockig forest, easterneres going west will marvel at the huge, open expanses on the crests, and anyone trying for a major summit in the northwest without rain gear and an ice axe is in trouble.
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