Last October, while traveling through the Blue Ridge Mountains, I was fortunate to encounter the North and South Branches of the New River in northwest North Carolina. The New River is actually quite old, perhaps the oldest river in North America.
From the junction of its two branches in North Carolina, the New River drops into the Ridge and Valley Province of the Appalachians, flowing northeastward. Near Radford, Virginia, the river angles to the NNW, slicing through the Appalachian Plateau of West Virginia and eventually merging with the Gauley River to form the Kanawha River, a major tributary of the Ohio. Having completed my medical residency at West Virginia University, in Morgantown, I was fortunate to experience a couple of canoe trips on the New River back in the late Seventies.
Geologists know this ancient river as the Teays, the predecessor of the Ohio River. Before the glacial advances of the Pleistocene, the Teays (now the New, Kanawha and central Ohio Rivers) continued to flow northwestward across Ohio and northern Indiana, eventually entering the Upper Mississippi. When the Pleistocene ice sheets blocked that course, the Teays diverted southwestward, forming the current Ohio River Valley. See: From Teays to Ohio
