Several years had passed since I’d last hunted with any enthusiasm. I’d go out into the field, find some game, and take home a few trophies, but the old thrill, that sense of anticipation and joy, had gone missing in action. I began to suspect my days of excitement and pleasure while on the hunt were at an end. 

I was at least an hour and a half into my conversation with June Goforth when I joked that she hadn’t given me a chance to ask any questions. She paused a moment before laughing and said, “Oh, I didn’t know you had questions.”
I had sat down with Goforth to talk about Camp Margaret Townsend, a Girl Scout camp that was a summer home away from home for hundreds of girls between 1925 and 1959.

“Into the Mist: Tales of Death and Disaster, Mishaps and Misdeeds, Misfortune and Mayhem in Great Smoky Mountains National Park Volume I” is now available in e-book format on popular electronic reader platforms.

Kuwohi Road will be temporarily closed for half-days on Sept. 9 and 16 to facilitate special educational programs for students from Swain County and Qualla Boundary schools. The park will close the road at midnight the night before each event and will reopen it by 2 p.m. 

Of all the chapters that I read and reviewed in my most recent review of the book “Letters From the Smokies” in Smoky Mountain Living (June-July 2025), the story of the Walker Sisters was the one story that got my attention probably more than any of the others.

To the Editor:

In the 2024 Presidential race, 49.8% of the votes went to Donald J. Trump, who promised to reduce the costs of consumer goods, end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and fix our immigration crisis.

Benjamin Merkle’s “The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great” (Thomas Nelson, 2009, 272 pages) tells the story of the Wessex monarch who resisted the Vikings and after decades of fighting and prayer drove them out of his kingdom. He also began unifying Anglo-Saxon England into one realm, a merger only completed during the reign of Athelstan, Alfred’s grandson. 

Earlier this summer, two Western North Carolina artists completed and installed a new public sculpture at a park in Virginia.  

Metalsmith William Rogers designed the work and created steel elements that support hammered copper panels made by Nathan Bush.

For all of you ’70s and ’80s hipsters, I’ve got one for you. In his new book, acclaimed author Paul Elie (“The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex and Controversy in the 1980s,” Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025, 464 pages) takes a deep dive into the music and arts scene of the 1970s and 80s.

County governments and conservation nonprofit groups may apply for grant funding from the N.C. Agricultural Development and Farmland Preservation Trust Fund for farmland preservation projects.