I’m watching all these storm lines with a combination of fascination and dread. We’ll begin getting ours overnight through Wednesday. Hoping the good old Blue Ridge Mountains shelter us to an extent as they often do.
Mountains (and other geographic features) do not offer shelter or protection from tornadoes. At the link is a tornado photographed at Sequoia National Park in 2004, at an elevation of 12,000 feet:
http://tornado.sfsu.edu/RockwellPassTornado/index.html