It is my considered opinion that an informed sense of place is comforting. I firmly believe that knowing “where” you are can help you discover just “who” you are.

What, for instance, do you think when you read about or hear someone refer to the Blue Ridge? Like the designation Alleghenies, which has multiple definitions, the designation Blue Ridge is amorphous.

There are, in fact, depending on who is making the definition, at least three versions of the term: the front of mountains that arises abruptly on the western edge of the piedmont in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia; the mountainous geographic province that extends from southern Pennsylvania to north Georgia; and the geologic Blue Ridge, which incorporates portions of the adjacent Piedmont.

When I was a boy growing up in the central Piedmont region of Virginia, I looked forward to summer vacations at my grandmother’s home at Abingdon, Va., in the mountains of that state. My heartbeat always quickened whenever I first spotted the dramatic Blue Ridge skyline looming on the western horizon.

For much of its length from northern Virginia into North Carolina, the Blue Ridge Parkway follows the rim of the Blue Ridge escarpment. (An escarpment — or scarp — is defined as “a cliff or steep rock face of great length.”) This Blue Ridge Front, as it is often called, reaches its greatest height at 2,500 feet near Blowing Rock. For anyone driving westward from the Piedmont toward the mountains the Blue Ridge escarpment forms a blue wall in the distance.

For geographers, biologists, and other specialists, the designation Blue Ridge has a much broader application. For them, it’s applied to a distinct mountainous region that lies within the larger Appalachian highlands region of the eastern United States.

Physiographers divide the Blue Ridge Province into two sections of equal length, although they vary greatly in breadth. North of Roanoke, Va., where the Roanoke River passes through a water gap, the province is a narrow ridge about 10 miles or less in width that extends northward almost 275 miles to Harrisburg, Pa. South of Roanoke it extends southwestward for 300 miles through east Tennessee, Western North Carolina, and northwestern South Carolina to the general area of Mt. Oglethorpe in north Georgia, about 35 miles north of Atlanta.

Bounded on the east by the Blue Ridge Front and on the west by the Unakas, Smokies, Cohuttas, and other mountain chains, this is the physiographic region known as the Southern Blue Ridge Province. It’s a vast highland terrain crisscrossed by a maze of mountain chains like the Blacks, Great Craggies, Balsams, Nantahalas, Snowbirds, and many others. In the entire Appalachian system, which extends over 1,200 miles from the Canadian province of Quebec to central Alabama, there are 41 peaks with elevations above 6,000 feet. All but one of these (Mt. Washington) are located in the Southern Blue Ridge. In fact, all 40 of these are located in either east Tennessee or Western North Carolina, mostly in the latter state.

In recent decades, geologists have increasingly recognized the close relationship between the western Piedmont region and the mountains proper. A map in the chapter devoted to the western Piedmont in The Geology of the Carolinas (University of Tennessee Press, 1991) delineates a swath of land extending from the Virginia line into Georgia. As you might expect, the eastern boundary of this map passes near Laurens and Spartanburg in South Carolina and Shelby and Hickory in North Carolina. The map’s western boundary is, however, something of a surprise. It passes along the Brevard fault just east of Asheville to the Virginia line.

Most residents of Hendersonville would probably scratch their heads if informed they lived in the piedmont rather than the mountains of North Carolina. But this approach correctly stresses the ancient and intimate relationship between the foothills portion of the Piedmont and the Blue Ridge to the west. The Piedmont is, after all, the eroded eastern rim of the Southern Appalachians.

So, where are we? I guess it depends on how you want to define your place in the scheme of things. I think of myself as living in the Great Smokies about three miles west of Bryson City. The Smokies are a massive mountain range on the western front of the Southern Blue Ridge Province, which is an extension of the Northern Blue Ridge Province. The Blue Ridge Province is a part of the Southern Appalachians, an extension of the Northern Appalachians. The Appalachians are a mountainous region in eastern North America in the western hemisphere on this sweet planet Earth.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com.