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Three hundred million years ago, the landmass that would become North America collided with something called Gondwana, a supercontinent made up of today’s Africa and South America. The Southern Appalachian Mountains formed when two continents collided. All told, the range cuts through 18 American states and five Canadian provinces. From there, they wind south, all the way to central Alabama.

At their northern tip, they rise in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. While you may think of “ Appalachia” as a region of the southern United States, the full Appalachian Mountains have a massive (not to mention international!) footprint. The Appalachian Mountains are nearly 2000 miles long. Though today’s topography of the Appalachian Mountains dates to about 20 million years, as West Virginia University geology professor Steve Kite told West Virginia Public Broadcasting, some areas are made up of rocks that are a whopping 1.2 billion years old. After those mountains wore away, another set emerged about 450 million years ago, and the cycle continued. The first mountains that appeared might have done so as long as a billion years ago, when North America and South America merged together as part of a supercontinent.

Mountains in the Appalachian region have cropped up several times-only to erode back down again. Partly, that’s due to the fact that the range didn’t form all at once. The Appalachian Mountains have been a fixture of the North American landscape for a long while, but exactly how old they are is a complicated question. Some of the oldest parts of the Appalachian Mountains are more than 1 billion years old. Here are 11 things you might not know about the Appalachian Mountains.

For many, the iconic mountain range calls to mind the extensive Appalachian Trail or the distinct dialect of Appalachian English, but the rugged peaks have been influencing the continent-and the world-for a lot longer than we’ve been around to appreciate them. The Appalachian Mountains occupy a towering spot in North American cultural identity.