so close together that no single feature stands out. Another factor is the dense forest cover in most of the Eastern Uplands which obscures the view almost everywhere. There are so few places where a good view can be had that even the most prominent landscape features of the Eastern Uplands are easily missed.

However, the Eastern Uplands are not just a broad expanse of similar bumps -so many hilly sheep huddled in a pasture. The character of the hills varies across the region.

Along the western edge of the region, there is a band of long ridges that has the most rugged topography in the Eastern Uplands. There is no commonly used name for this region, but geologists recognize it as part of a distinct zone of rock that stretches as far north as Maine. This land form can be traced from Killingworth, Connecticut into the Wilbraham Hills of Massachusetts. The zone's most prominent feature is Bolton Ridge, a nearly continuous ridge that runs from the Massachusetts border south to Portland, Connecticut. The whole zone may be called the Bolton Range, the name given to the area by James Gates Percival, an early Connecticut geologist.⁵

The Bolton Range can be subdivided into a northern and a southern half. The northern portion is the more rugged of the two, reaching 1,121 feet at Bald Mountain and nearly as high at Soapstone Mountain. The southern half is not as high but still stands out from the surrounding countryside. The dividing line between the northern and southern portions occurs along an interruption in the underlying bedrock, the section of the Bolton Range that is most susceptible to erosion. In a manner rather gratifying to a geologist's sense of the way the world is supposed to work, the Connecticut River uses this weaker spot to cross the hard rocks of the Bolton Range.

Because of the Bolton Range's rough terrain, fewer farms were established there than in most of the rest of the Eastern Uplands. Many of these farms, hacked out of the steep forests, were abandoned early in the 1800s because the soils were thin and the sheer slopes difficult to plow. These abandoned homesteads were prime candidates for transfer to state ownership, and several large state forests were established in the

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