Last week found my two youngest sons and me in the Mountain State on a bit of a personal errand. A good friend offered a used car to my middle son, Sammy, and the only catch was, we had to go pick it up. We were on the road before daylight on Monday morning in a borrowed truck and trailer to go after a gently used Ford Festiva, just outside of Charleston, West Virginia.

A little Mountain State trivia for you here. The Ohio-West Virginia state line is defined as the ‘low watermark on the northwest or Ohio side of the river,’ meaning that when leaving Ohio, one enters West Virginia as soon as you begin to cross the water of the Ohio River. It is also said that if you flattened out all the mountains in the state of West Virginia, it would be as big as Texas. This last statement may be more humorous than factual.

The truth of the matter is, West Virginia is known as the Mountain State for a reason. The entire state lies within the Appalachian Mountain range. While the mountains are not as high as the Rockies, for instance, the landscape of much of the state is quite rugged.

I’ve explained to my boys more than once that our home state of Ohio does not have any mountains, only some big hills. That does beg the question of what, exactly, a hill is. Cavanal Hill in Oklahoma, at 2,385 feet above sea level and 1,999 feet above the surrounding landscape, is billed as the ‘world’s highest hill.’ More information is needed. Webster is not much help on the matter, defining a mountain as ‘a height exceeding a hill.’ As expected, a hill is ‘a well-defined natural elevation smaller than a mountain.’ Is it possible that some people have unknowingly been making only hills out of molehills instead making mountains out of molehills?

For further clarity, I turned to the United States Geological Survey’s U.S. Board on Geographic names. More than 40 geographic features are defined here, including gap, ridge, and summit. All three of the aforementioned words have definitions that reference both hill and mountain, but interestingly, the Board on Geographic Names has no definitions for either hill or mountain.

Sometime in the 1970s, the Board on Geographic Names abandoned the notion of using above and below the 1,000-foot mark as the break between hills and mountains. Some geologists would peg a mountain as at least 2,000 feet high. Our friends in the UK use 600-610 meters, or 1,969-2,000 feet, as their mountain measuring stick.

I’m left to wonder if Cavanal Hill in Oklahoma suddenly grew one foot higher and measured in at 2,000 feet, would it cease to be a hill and become Cavanal Mountain at that point? There are questions we will never have answers to. Maybe now I’m making mountains out of molehills.

Reach BJ Price at 937-456-5159 for more information.