New discoveries enhance understanding of enigmatic Smokies photographer
From George Masa’s 1915 arrival in Asheville until his death in 1933, the trailblazing Japanese photographer explored the Smoky Mountains, mapping trails and capturing the region’s grandeur and beauty in photographs that helped make the case for the creation of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. But Masa’s friends — and the researchers who followed — have long wondered: where did Masa’s love of the mountains originate?
Join HBS for a ‘celebration of place’
Highlands Biological Station is hosting a free “celebration of place” event.
The one-day event will feature:
• Rare & unusual native plants for sale, including the beloved Oconee Bells.
Smokies Life publishes George Masa biography
Smokies Life has announced the publication of “George Masa: A Life Reimagined,” the first comprehensively researched biography of the visionary Japanese photographer whose dedication to art and conservation helped spur the national park movement in the Great Smoky Mountains, as well as the creation of the Appalachian Trail.
The story behind the man: First-ever Horace Kephart biography explores a complex man and momentous life
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.
