What is the highest summit of the Appalachian mountains?

The Appalachian Mountains are a large group of North American mountains. They are partly in Canada, but mostly in the U.S. They form an area from 100 (161 km) to 300 (483 km) miles wide, running 1,500 miles (2414 km) from the island of Newfoundland in Canada to central Alabama in the United States.

The Appalachians today are the worn-down remains of a once huge mountain chain. They first formed about 480 million years ago during the Ordovician and once reached heights similar to that of the Alps and the Rocky Mountains.

The individual mountains average around 3,000 ft (900 m) in height. The highest is Mt. Mitchell in North Carolina (6,684 ft or 2,037m). The highest peaks east of the Mississippi all reside in the Blue Ridge province of the Southern Appalachians, most notably in the Black and Great Smoky mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee.

Five of the top 10 summits belong to the Black Mountains, a small but significant range in western North Carolina named for their dark high-elevation forests of spruce and fir.

The highest summit is Mount Mitchell followed by Mount Craig in the Black Mountains, These are surrounded by a collection of impressively high neighbours, including Balsam Cone, Mount Gibbes and the modestly named Potato Hill. Clingmans Dome (6,643 ft or 2025 m) is the tallest summit in the Great Smoky Mountains.