No matter where you were in the world, spring 2020 was a time of fear and uncertainty. The expanding COVID-19 pandemic prompted prevention measures that would have previously been unthinkable: closures of schools, restaurants, and even public lands like Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It was amid this backdrop that Frances Figart, creative services director for Smokies Life (then called Great Smoky Mountains Association), met with Marketing Coordinator Elly Wells for a brainstorming session. How could Smokies Life continue connecting people to the park when visiting was not allowed?
“At the time, George Ellison still had his Nature Journal column in the Asheville Citizen-Times, in which he shed light on various wonders of biodiversity from his secluded cove several miles west of Bryson City, surrounded on three sides by the park,” Figart recalled. “But Parkinson’s disease was wreaking havoc on George’s ability to generate new material, and sometimes the paper had to rerun an older story.”
