Booming Times, Busted Budgets: Growing visitation strains resources in and around the GSMNP
Christine Cole Proctor was home alone with her big sister at the family cabin on Forney Creek when she heard an unfamiliar rumble climbing the isolated mountain road. It was a car — the first they’d ever seen scale the rugged route.
Smokies adopts parking fee
Starting March 1, visiting the Great Smoky Mountains National Park will no longer be completely free — a first for park history.
Missing person found dead in park
The body of a Knoxville man who went missing while traveling to Charlotte was found Friday, Aug. 5, in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Cherokee wants name change for Clingmans Dome
Following a unanimous vote from the Cherokee Tribal Council July 14 , the tribe is expected to petition the federal government to change the name of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park’s highest mountain, Clingmans Dome, to Kuwahi — the name Cherokee people called it for generations prior to European conquest.
Counting cars: Smokies updates decades-old visitation estimator
Anybody who’s been to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the last few years has seen it — overflowing parking lots, mobbed trails and narrow mountain roads lined with cars. They’re visual symptoms of a national park bursting at the seams with unprecedented levels of visitation, hitting a highwater mark in 2021 at 14.1 million visits.
Wild Vision: George Masa book pairs famed images with modern experiences
The 1900s were just a few years along when a young man named Masahara Iizuka stepped on American soil for the first time. Around 26 years old, he’d arrived in California to pursue a career in engineering, having studied the subject at Meiji University back in Tokyo.
N.C. House opposes Smokies parking fee
The N.C. House of Representatives last week condemned the Great Smoky Mountains National Park’s controversial proposal to enact a parking fee with passage of a resolution that calls on Congress to block the plan.
One man’s vision of the Southern Appalachians
In my recent passion and ongoing interest in reviewing books by local and regional authors, I am offering here, yet another from our cache of talented writers that are close to home. In this case, it’s a book just released in the month of June by regionally heralded Hub City Press in Spartanburg, S.C., just over the North Carolina line.
Time to fly: Disc golf course opens in Cherokee
Sandwiched between the flowing waters of Raven Fork and the final southern stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway, a new championship-caliber disc golf course in Cherokee beckons to locals and tourists alike.
The story of one family among thousands
In response to the news of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP) proposing fees for parking, now is an opportunity to flip the script. While other groups are finally being recognized after too long being ignored, marginalized and even intimidated, the GSMNP has an opportunity to bring to light those who lost their livelihoods, homes and communities to make way for the Park.
