These are the oldest mountains in the world, and their stories have been hiding here for ages. And I think that’s what attracts settlers, pilgrims, adventurers, and storytellers, all of us wondering what’s in those misty mountains.
I spoke with Joey Henson some years ago, and he helped me understand why the lifetimers in Appalachia seem to hold tightly to their secrets. It’s because they’re hard won.
The mountains demand reverence. They are mountains within mountains, and we think we know them because we’ve seen them so many times. The landscape, though, only reveals itself in many little patient moments. We think we’ve conquered them with roads that slice and wind along the same footpaths that were traveled slowly among them centuries before us. But they have time and gravity and rain on their side.
Everything eventually slides off the mountains, becoming part of the landscape. The mountains simply wait, allowing the timeless powers that shaped them to reshape them again. Hurricane Helene taught us this one day in September 2024. They, the mountains, are recipients and conduits of endless change.
They also are full of gifts and mythologies.
From western North Carolina near Boone to the eastern mountains of Tennessee near the Roan Highlands and on up toward Mouth of Wilson in Virginia where wild ponies and fire-eating cattle roam free–these mountains can fill the imagination.
“There’s a whole world within each 50 yard section of rhododendron,” Joey Henson said. “I don’t tell people how to get to the places I’ve explored. I want them to find it for themselves.”
The Appalachian Mountains invite you to engage with the wild world on its own terms and to be shaped by it–away from screens (like this one) and too many voices that would draw you back too quickly toward every decoy posing as reality.