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This is part of Iconic Passages, a collection of stories celebrating America and the many ways we move through its vast and diverse landscapes. Read more here.
I took a wrong turn and got quite lost on a hike once, when I was 10 years old. We hiked often as a family on the forested ridgetop trail a few miles from our house in the highlands of western Pennsylvania. The trail near us wasn’t part of the main Appalachian trail, though it belongs to the same broader region of forest trails in northern Appalachia. The two trails share the same tremendous hemlock and pine trees and red oaks that have held steady for over 300 years.
Idra Novey
Idra Novey is a poet, novelist, and translator who grew up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a former steel town in the Allegheny Highlands of Appalachia.
There is a mythic sense of deep time that happens while hiking under centenarian trees and knowing they have outlasted all the wrong turns humans have made beneath them. The vast, dense forests of Appalachia—held apart as a separate realm operating according to a cultural logic of its own—also occupy a fabled place in the American imagination. I suspect part of the allure of hiking through Appalachia has to do with this distinct status: The region has long been cast as a mysterious, storied place, not quite like the rest of the country.
In 2025 nearly 17 million people hiked some part of the Appalachian Trail. Extending across 14 states, from Georgia to Maine, the broader trail system attracted more total visitors last year than the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone. According to the National Park Service, the footpaths through the forested ridgetops of Pennsylvania are among the most popular. TikTok is flooded with melodramatic videos about the dangers of stepping into the mountains of Appalachia, with spooky music and sepia photos of solemn-faced people in rocking chairs mixed with mentions of Appalachian folktale figures like the Mothman and the Wampus Cat.
TikTok didn’t exist when I was growing up in the 1990s, and I wasn’t aware of how the rest of the country talked about Appalachia. I made up plenty of stories of my own, however, while walking under its towering ancient trees. I can’t recall what story I was conjuring the day I veered onto a different footpath from my family. When I realized I could no longer see or hear any of them, I didn’t panic or rush back to them. We lived near a stretch of woods where I played often with my younger brother, who joined in the elaborate escape stories I invented to give us new reasons to hide behind the same familiar trees or splash through the same creek we’d been crossing for years.
