Appalachia Volume 56

Appalachia, America's longest-running journal of mountaineering and conservation, brings readers stories of adventure among the world's highest peaks. Published biannually, Appalachia's unique blend of adventure, conservation, and poetry is perfect reading for outdoor lovers, dedicated mountaineers, conservationists, and armchair adventurers alike. The Winter/Spring 2006 issue includes one explorer's encounter with wildness on the outskirts of Anchorage, plus a tale of peakbagging in Scotland's famous and beautiful Highlands region. Readers will also find news and notes on recent mountaineering expeditions worldwide, nature-inspired poetry, and fascinating accident reports that illustrate the do's and don'ts for safe outdoor adventure.

Forty-five species of lower Middle Ordovician trilobites, including six new genera and thirty new species, are described and illustrated from the extensive collections in the United States National Museum. Most of these species occur in beds whose age and correlation have been a matter of controversy for more than a decade. The stratigraphic evidence afforded by the trilobites lends strong support to regional stratigraphic interpretations of the lower Champlainian beds in the Appalachian Valley, which have been worked out by G. Arthur Cooper and the writer fromdetailed study of brachiopod faunas and from physical stratigraphic studies. The trilobites, like brachiopods, are not so restricted in their facies distribution as are many groups of invertebrate fossils. Hence they are very useful in establishing contemporaneity of dissimilar facies. In this paper only the more common trilobites are described. The principal purpose of this study is to make available for biostratigraphic use a number of trilobite species, most of which have been confused or misidentified previously.

In 1750 the Appalachian Mountains were a formidable barrier between the British colonies in the east and French territory in the west, passable only on foot or horseback. It took more than a century to break the mountain barrier and open the west to settlement. In 1751 a private Virginia company pioneered a road from Maryland to Ohio, challenging the French and Indians for the Ohio country. Several wars stalled the road, which did not start in earnest until after Ohio became a state in 1803. The stone-paved Cumberland Road--from Cumberland, Maryland, to Wheeling, Virginia--was complete by 1818 and over the next 30 years was traversed by Conestoga wagons and stagecoaches. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad--the first general purpose railroad in the world--started in Baltimore in the 1820s and reached Wheeling by 1852, uniting east and west.