Thanks for the suggestions. I've looked through all of these things without success. I'll keep hunting. I did find some places on the terrain that did not have this problem. The terrain file is loaded nearby to this spot, so I'm not sure if that would do it or not.
@TU - fractal noise is set really low on the low side - .01 and it's good to know about the > 1 for contrast. In this case, I don't have any fractals colors >1.
@monks - the fractal range is all good - .01 is the highest of the low numbers and in some cases I go a lot lower. Not using the Perlin Ridge for my Tweak Settings
@Virex - I'm at about 150M high in the preview you see here.