The feather cape changes that whole dynamic to be fair, once I made mine (x2 for retrieving stuff if needed) You can travel the length and breadth of the biome and never go down into the valleys unless you want to. It also makes escaping pursuit easy, just climb and jump away, land and rinse repeat as necessary.

The Mistlands suddenly became my favourite place, even to a point where I build scaffolds up to high places to build portals so I can just jump off a glide down whenever I want.