The Appalachians are a long line of mountains in eastern North America. They run southwest from Quebec in Canada through the eastern United States and on to Alabama. They are old mountains, worn down and often wooded, not sharp and snowy like the Rockies out west. They sit between the Atlantic side of the country and the interior. People also say the Appalachian Mountains; the Appalachians is the shorter everyday name for the same chain, the way we say the Alps or the Rockies. Though actually, in loose talk some people say Appalachians when they only mean the part they drove through in one state. The name is a range-name, not a single peak. This entry is the mountains, not the cultural region called Appalachia, which is only one inhabited stretch of that chain, mostly thought of as the southeast.