Anybody who’s been to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the last few years has seen it — overflowing parking lots, mobbed trails and narrow mountain roads lined with cars. They’re visual symptoms of a national park bursting at the seams with unprecedented levels of visitation,  hitting a highwater mark in 2021 at 14.1 million visits.

The 1900s were just a few years along when a young man named Masahara Iizuka stepped on American soil for the first time. Around 26 years old, he’d arrived in California to pursue a career in engineering, having studied the subject at Meiji University back in Tokyo.

The N.C. House of Representatives last week condemned the Great Smoky Mountains National Park’s controversial proposal to enact a parking fee with passage of a resolution  that calls on Congress to block the plan.

In my recent passion and ongoing interest in reviewing books by local and regional authors, I am offering here, yet another from our cache of talented writers that are close to home. In this case, it’s a book just released in the month of June by regionally heralded Hub City Press in Spartanburg, S.C., just over the North Carolina line.

Sandwiched between the flowing waters of Raven Fork and the final southern stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway, a new championship-caliber disc golf course  in Cherokee beckons to locals and tourists alike.

In response to the news of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP) proposing fees for parking, now is an opportunity to flip the script. While other groups are finally being recognized after too long being ignored, marginalized and even intimidated, the GSMNP has an opportunity to bring to light those who lost their livelihoods, homes and communities to make way for the Park.

A parking fee  proposed for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park has earned support from organizations ranging from the National Parks Conservation Association to the North Shore Cemetery Association — but also opposition from a growing list of governments and elected officials.

Since its official opening in 1934, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park has been free  to enter, to park, to hike, to explore. The intervening years have made free access a core principle of the park’s identity, cherished by residents of gateway communities like Bryson City and Gatlinburg — many of whom are descendants of the families forced from their homes to make way for the park’s creation.

The proposed parking fee for visitors to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park has users — especially locals in the gateway communities whose family histories are intertwined with the Smokies — understandably upset. The identity of the Smokies and those who live near it are more closely aligned than at other national parks. Locals have roamed freely (save for some camping fees) for several generations on land that was taken with the promise that there would never be a charge for visiting.

A visit to the nation’s most popular national park could cease being free if a groundbreaking proposal  put forth by the Great Smoky Mountains National Park last week is enacted.