Come out to the Ralph J. Andrews Campground on Lake Glenville for a family camping event. 

The National Park Service (NPS), in partnership with Catalyst Sports, Knox County, Kampgrounds of America Foundation and Friends of the Smokies, announced the expansion of adaptive ranger-led programs in 2024. 

A decades-long debate over paddling rules on the Upper Chattooga River has come to a close after the appearance of a final ruling in November 2023 took some stakeholders by surprise. 

Start off the year with an early-season slalom race Saturday, Feb. 17, on the Nantahala River at the Nantahala Outdoor Center. 

In 1971, Payson and Aurelia Kennedy were living a successful, stable life in Atlanta. Payson was a librarian at Georgia Tech, Aurelia a schoolteacher. They had four kids, retirement funds, and the deed to their house.

Bryson City Olympian Evy Leibfarth will leave Tokyo without a medal, but the 17-year-old is already setting her sights on the 2024 games in Paris. 

Bryson City Olympian Evy Leibfarth , 17, came up short in her quest for an Olympic kayaking medal but will have another shot at the podium in Tokyo when she races in the first-ever Olympic women’s canoe slalom. 

Western North Carolina teenager Evy Leibfarth will represent the United States in the Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo this year after placing first in two Olympic Team Trials competitions in April. 

On Friday, June 21, a 15-year-old girl from Bryson City took her place in the water for the first heat of her first run as an adult competitor on the international circuit. The roiling World Cup course in Bratislava, Slovakia, was thousands of miles away from her home in Western North Carolina, and her competitors were veteran paddlers, some with Olympic appearances and even Olympic medals to their name. 

Bunny Johns became a paddler mostly by accident.

As a college freshman in the early 1960s, she’d lined up a summer job in her hometown outside of Atlanta but returned to discover the position had fallen through. Then a friend of hers called to say she’d been offered a job teaching swimming at Camp Merrie-Woode in Sapphire but didn’t want to go — maybe Johns, who had been a competitive swimmer in high school, would want to take her place?