BANGOR DAILY NEWS • July 10, 2024
For some of those thru-hikers, however, Katahdin is not actually the end of the road. For those intrepid wanderers, there’s thousands more miles to traverse across Canada, Greenland, Europe and North Africa, in a dispersed array of trails known as the International Appalachian Trail. According to the International Appalachian Trail organization, the Appalachian Mountains are part of an ancient chain of mountains called the Appalachian-Caledonian, formed more than 250 million years ago during the Paleozoic Era, on the supercontinent of Pangea. Back then, the mountains straddled a part of Pangea that later broke apart and became what is now eastern North America, eastern Greenland, western Europe and northwestern Africa.