Judy and Ed LaFountaine, wife and husband, are the 2024 recipients of the Junaluska Leadership Award, an honor bestowed annually during Associates Celebration Weekend at Lake Junaluska, which was held recently at the new Warren Center. 

A team of Great Smoky Mountains National Park employees was recently awarded the 2023 Excellence in Education Award at a National Park Service awards ceremony in Washington D.C. Many of the agency’s top awards were presented at the 2023 National Service Awards ceremony. 

Less than six months after her death at just over two years old, Charlotte Joy Norris is posthumously receiving an award for her courage in the face of a dire situation she wasn’t even old enough to understand.

Smokies Life, formerly Great Smoky Mountains Association, received national recognition at the 2024 Public Lands Alliance Partnership Awards for its “Junior Ranger Activity Guide,” which won in a category for Outstanding Public Engagement.

The N.C. Source Water Collaborative — a statewide drinking water protection group — has announced the winners of the Source Water Protection Awards during the Water Resources Research Institute’s annual conference, held last month, and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians took home one of the prizes. 

In recognition of the outsize impact that longtime members Bill and Sharon Van Horn have had on the organization, the Nantahala Hiking Club has created a new annual award in honor of their contributions. 

With a list of novels, five books of poetry and seven collections of short stories, Ron Rash has garnered a number of prestigious awards in his writing career.

Nancy Carroll has been named Southern Highlands Reserve’s Volunteer of the Year for 2023 in recognition of the “life, laughter and bright optimism” she brings to Volunteer Day at the Reserve. 

Million-dollar mountaintop vacation homes, phony moonshine from corporate mega-distilleries, dime-a-dozen seedy strip malls — none of these things are Appalachian things, and if one of the hardy old Mountaineers of yore was magically transported through time to the present day, they’d hardly recognize the place. 

Mountain Projects, one of 52 regional human service organizations working on North Carolina’s groundbreaking Healthy Opportunities Pilot program (HOP), under the auspices of Impact Health, has been recognized by Mission Health Partners with its 2022 Community Partner Award.