A successor has been chosen for Sylva Police Chief Tammy Hooper following a three-month search by a panel of Western North Carolina law enforcement and managers.

“When we get out, we’re going to walk across the street and I’m going to show you the most sacred spot,” Larry Mellichamp said as he began his botanical tour of the Blue Ridge Parkway. 

The spot in question wasn’t a gravesite or a cultural landmark or even one of the many breathtaking overlooks spread along the Parkway’s 469-foot length. Rather, it was a seemingly dead end — a face of rock bordering the north side of the road, slick with water seeping from within, partly shrouded by flourishing vegetation. 

By now, most everyone is familiar — often far too personally — with the toll of the opioid epidemic. Lost lives, stolen futures, vanished trust. Loved ones transformed into unrecognizable ghosts of themselves. Law enforcement, mental health and emergency services pushed past capacity. 

A group of residents living along South River Road in Jackson County say they’ve noticed an uptick in the number of speeders and commercial vehicles along the rural two-lane, and they’re asking the N.C. Department of Transportation to do something about it. 

Unless someone else signs up to run for Mayor of Forest Hills by noon on Friday, July 26, the Sylva Board of Commissioners will be the only contested race in Jackson County this year. 

Investigators with the National Park Service Investigative Services Branch are trying to determine the circumstances surrounding the death of David Carver, Jr., who was found in Great Smoky Mountains National Park on Monday, July 8. They are seeking information from the public to make that determination. 

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. 

With just three days to go before election filing closes, there is still a dearth of candidates for open seats on the Webster Town Council and Village of Forest Hills Council.

A survey aimed at gauging support for an indoor swimming pool in Jackson County came down favorably for pool proponents, with 68 percent of respondents saying that they’d support such a project — even if it meant raising property taxes. 

The price tag on a project to install sidewalks along Skyland Drive in Sylva has more than doubled, with town commissioners voting July 11 to allocate an additional $175,000 for the endeavor. 

After putting nearly 300 hours and just short of a year toward an effort to develop an alternative vision for the N.C. 107 project in Sylva, the Asheville Design Center presented its findings to the Sylva Board of Commissioners Thursday, July 11. 

A development on Western Carolina University’s Millennial Campus in Cullowhee has been cited by the state for violating North Carolina’s Sediment Pollution Control Act and the terms of the project’s construction stormwater permit.

Sports betting is likely to come to Cherokee following the N.C. House of Representatives’ July 15 vote to pass a Senate bill allowing it to occur on the Qualla Boundary. 

Great Smoky Mountains National Park rangers responded to a single-car motor vehicle accident on Clingmans Dome Road at approximately 12:30 p.m. on Monday, July 15. The driver of the vehicle, Timothy Patrick James McCauley, 37, of Farmington, Missouri died as a result of his injuries. The passenger, Angela Walker, 38, was flown to University of Tennessee Medical Center by Lifestar.

The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians will enter into a $13.5 million contract to purchase 197.62 acres of land along Interstate 40 in Tennessee following a unanimous vote from Tribal Council July 11.

The identity of a man whose remains were found in an off-trail area of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park this week has been released.

Searchers found David J. Carver, 64, of Blount County, Tennessee, near Laurel Creek Road between Townsend and Cades Cove on Monday, July 8, after receiving a tip from an off-trail hiker. His remains appeared to be several months old.

The Knox County Regional Forensic Center identified Carver by comparing medical records. The cause of death and activity at time of death are under investigation. An autopsy is being performed, and no additional details are currently available.

Rob Gudger shares his Haywood County homestead with three canines and a housecat, but of the four the feline is the only one he considers a pet. 

The canines live outside, get their sustenance in one massive feast per week, and give no visible indication that they know their names. That’s pretty well out of the normal for the life of a domestic dog, but the animals aren’t domestic dogs. 

Western Carolina University and the Tuckaseigee Water and Sewer Authority will explore the possibility of combining their water systems following receipt of a $50,000 grant from the State Water Infrastructure Authority, which the TWSA board voted to accept at its June 18 meeting. 

After more than a year in flux, Jackson County’s health and social service boards are likely to be re-established within the next couple months. 

After more than a decade working together as members of Tribal Council, Alan “B” Ensley and Jim Owle are vying for the position of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians’ next vice chief. 

A program that’s been getting Western North Carolina kids outside since 2016 is now a statewide offering, with a whirlwind tour of 10 North Carolina state parks over the next couple weeks celebrating ecoEXPLORE’s arrival at all 41 park units. 

“There’s a lot of benefits to being outdoors, and it’s something that we’re seeing less and less in adults and children,” said Jonathan Marchal, youth education manager at the N.C. Arboretum in Asheville. “A lot of times it’s almost like a competition — you can go outside and be screen-free, or you can go indoors and be completely immersed in a screen. I think one approach that is helpful is utilizing those items like smartphones as tools to explore the environment, and not just as tools to explore the environment but to engage kids in doing conservation work.”

Principal Chief Richard Sneed and challenger Teresa McCoy will face off at the ballot box this September as Cherokee voters decide who should be their chief for the next four years, but last week they met onstage at the Joyce Dugan Performing Arts Center for a debate hosted by The Cherokee One Feather. 

UPDATED 1/24/2020: Following several meetings with the alleged victim and family, the District Attorney's Office declined to file charges in this case. Anyone accused of a crime is considered innocent until proven guilty. 

In a ceremony held at the Cherokee Indian Hospital today, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians was awarded the Redefining American Healthcare award from the Healthcare Leadership Council.

Trillium Gap Trail in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park will be temporarily closed through Thursday, July 11, due to hazardous trail conditions. The area received heavy rainfall over the last couple of weeks causing extremely slippery, muddy conditions on the trail surface undergoing rehabilitation.

After more than 20 years of wood chopping and log sawing and award winning, the Haywood Community College Lumberjacks — the school’s timbersports team — will soon gain a permanent home. 

“The current practice facility is back where the old mill used to be, and it’s probably just as old as that was, late ‘60s,” said Matt Heimburg, dean of arts, sciences and natural resources at HCC. “It has a tin roof and a few logs somehow holding it up. So it’s long overdue for them to get a new practice space, for sure.”

In his first public statement on a bill he cosponsored in March, Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., wrote an op-ed published in The Charlotte Observer June 19 decrying the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians’ opposition to legislation that would pave the way for a Catawba Indian Nation casino in Kings Mountain. 

An effort to get a proposed constitution on the Cherokee ballot as a referendum question this September will not come to fruition following Tribal Council’s June 13 vote to withdraw the legislation.

The Watershed Association of the Tuckasegee River has a new leader.

Two years after former executive director Roger Clapp retired from the position, Ken Brown is taking over.

Jackson County Commissioners held a special-called meeting Tuesday, June 11, to vote on the proposed budget for fiscal year 2019-2020, a change from the original June 18 adoption timeline.

Voters made their choices during last week’s Primary Elections in Cherokee, with Teresa McCoy coming in as the top vote-getter in the race for principal chief and two incumbent Tribal Council members failing to survive through September’s General Election.

Federal campaign finance records show that Wallace Cheves, developer for a proposed Catawba Indian Nation casino in Kings Mountain, donated nearly $50,000 between 2015 and 2018 to the campaigns of the three U.S. senators sponsoring a bill aimed at making the casino a reality.

The bill, S.790, is sponsored by South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and co-sponsored by Sen. Thom Tillis and Sen. Richard Burr, both republicans of North Carolina.

The Jackson County Commissioners will adopt the budget for fiscal year 2019-2020 in a special-called meeting at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 11, a change from the original June 18 adoption timeline.

Preliminary results are in from Cherokee’s June 6 Primary Election.

It’s no coincidence that the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was the subject of The Smoky Mountain News’ first-ever front-page story in the paper’s inaugural issue June 2, 1999.

“A large herd gathered last week on a remote, historical farmstead maintained by the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, in Cataloochee Valley,” Don Hendershot wrote for The Smoky Mountain News on Feb. 7, 2001. “The herd, however, were bipeds — nearly 900 people were in attendance for the first of three scheduled elk releases.”

Harrah’s Cherokee Casino Resort, an economic powerhouse that employs 5 percent of the workforce in the seven western counties and provides hundreds of millions of dollars each year to the tribe’s government and citizens, first opened its doors in 1997. 

For a road that has never existed, the infamous Southern Loop of Sylva sure has gotten a lot of ink over the past 20 years. 

When Patrick Lambert won the 2015 race for principal chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, he saw the victory as a direct mandate from voters. 

This roller coaster of a year at Western Carolina University started before it started, when the school’s beloved chancellor David O. Belcher announced Nov. 27, 2017, that he’d be stepping down at the end of the year.

A Brevard woman is dead following a car accident on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Devil's Courthouse. 

Horace Kephart has been dead for 88 years, but his name and his story still pull an undercurrent through Western North Carolina. 

Kephart is acclaimed as the father of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, an outdoorsman gifted with an adventurous soul, and the author of such staples of regional literature as Our Southern Highlanders and Camping and Woodcraft. He’s derided, too, as a man with a severe drinking problem, a shirker of family responsibility and an outsider who profited off of sometimes less-than-flattering depictions of the locals. 

Planned improvements to the Southwestern Community College firing range aimed at reducing noise pollution and lead buildup will have to wait after bids for the project came in nearly double the estimated cost.

Early voting is now over in Cherokee, with polls to open for the Primary Election on Thursday, June 6, in what has already been an eventful election season. 

Jackson County’s proposed budget for 2019-2020 won’t require an increase from the current property tax rate of 0.38 cents per $100 of value, and at $65 million it clocks in at 0.78 percent higher than the 2018-19 approved budget and 2.01 percent lower than the amended 2018-19 budget. 

In the last few years, Jackson County has poured significant investment into its public schools, including $9 million in much-needed repairs to roofs, heating and water systems; new teaching positions paid for through local funds; security upgrades; and, in the last budget year, six school counselor positions, four school resource officers and one juvenile crime detective. 

An Iredell County man is dead following a swim at Lake Glenville Sunday, May 26.

Jeff Carpenter knows the woods. 

A native of Otto who’s spent most of his adult life the next county over in Sylva, he learned from his father Earvin Carpenter what it means to be an outdoorsman and a mountain man. He knows how to hunt and track and orienteer. He’s seen more than a few bears, heard more than a few coyotes, spent more than a few nights camped out in the backcountry. 

But over the last 15 years, he’s become convinced that there’s something out there that doesn’t show up in standard field guides. 

After 22 years with the Sylva Police Department and two years as its head, Sylva Police Chief Tammy Hooper will retire on Aug. 1, 2019. 

The return of warmer weather means that Jackson County’s cold weather homeless shelter has been closed for two months, but commissioners have some tough discussions ahead as they plan what to do when the weather turns chilly once more.