h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

We've been hating on this snow since sometime in February.

You mostly missed out on this storm. It passed far enough out to sea that the only land masses that were hit were the ones that jutted out.

It pays to be at the top of the Appalachians - and 500 feet above the river.

Which river? The Susquehanna? The Monongahela? The Allegheny? The Styx?

of course, if you're close enough to Lake Erie, you would get a Godzilla-sized load of lake-effect snow.

No, we're far enough from Lake Erie to avoid it - Erie gets a ton of snow, though, and we know people there.

The river is a tributary of the Allegheny called the Clarion. It used to be called Stump Creek before early settlers decided to apply better advertising techniques...

When I was in my teens, I drew maps of the streams in the Mississippi River system. I logged more than 10,000 streams. I have a vague memory of the Clarion, which is ironic given its name.

It's an attractive river these days - now that the logging and petroleum bubbles have bursts.

I've read novels that feature the landscape of Pennsylvania. "Rabbit, Run," for instance. Those elevated ridges are very long. You could have a town on each side of the ridge, a few miles apart as the crow flies, but you might have to drive 30 or 40 miles to get from one to the other. I gather that it's the same story in eastern Tennessee as well.

Definitely. My dad's family is from the Tennessee mountains, so we always felt at home in western Pennsylvania.

I used to love poring over Army Corps of Engineers topographical maps of those states. It was fun to see just how far a river could flow in a narrow groove before finding a gap and flowing into some other river.

Yeah - it's fun to follow the charts, and then see what it looks like up close.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twQB29LNvCk

'Almost heaven, West Virginia' takes on a different aspect if you've ever been in Beckley on a rainy Sunday morning...back in the old days...