Holly Kays
As the drought of 2016 progressed, flows of streams and rivers dwindled region-wide — and the Tuckasegee River, water source for most of Jackson County, was no exception.
A look back at 2016: Backcountry adventures, birthday celebrations and a wildfire season to remember
For those who love the outdoors, it’s not hard to list the reasons why Western North Carolina is a spectacular place to live, and from that standpoint, the year 2016 certainly didn’t fail to deliver. The curtains are now closing on 2016, but the year will get its proper send-off with this roundup of favorite moments and memorable stories from the past 12 months outdoors.
Judy Seago almost left the United States without packing a stethoscope.
Seago, a pediatrician, was headed to Nepal on a honeymoon trek with her new husband Jerry Parker, a pharmacist. Medical missions weren’t part of the itinerary for the Jackson County couple — it was supposed to be all about exploring the miles-high mountains of Nepal’s Annapurna range.
Caitlin Derico was 11 years old when her family’s Christmas tradition shifted from stockings to service.
Simply removing contaminated dirt from the Southwestern Community College shooting range won’t be enough to close out a lead removal project that’s been in the works since April 2014, the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality announced this month.
Jackson County is hoping to save $2.3 million on the cost of completing critical repairs in Jackson County Public Schools through a loan program that would lend the $9 million needed at 0 percent interest.
A Cherokee firefighter has pled guilty to federal charges for intentionally starting seven wildfires on the Qualla Boundary between 2010 and 2014, which cost the Bureau of Indian Affairs a total of $106,700 to extinguish.
The smoke has cleared from the Chimney Tops 2 Fire, which escaped the Great Smoky Mountains National Park Nov. 28 to cover more than 17,000 acres and result in 14 deaths, but park officials are just beginning the daunting task of dealing with the aftermath.
Dowdy Bradley is 68 years old, and for nearly all of those years he’s been involved in some kind of farming, staying with the land through drought and flood, surplus and scarcity. The drought of 2016, however, has been the worst, hands-down — for him and for growers throughout the region.
“This has been some of the hottest, driest weather I’ve seen, “ Bradley said. “I was worried about the water because it was already getting low. A couple pastures just dried up.”
When Mark Jones first ran for a seat on the Jackson County Board of Commissioners in 2006, he was the general manager of High Hampton Inn and Country Club in Cashiers, a demanding and well-paid position. But when he won the election, Jones knew he wouldn’t be able to keep the job while also fulfilling his newly acquired civic responsibilities.
Members of the Cherokee Tribal Council are hands-down the highest-paid local representatives in Western North Carolina, with other commissioner stipends paling in comparison to the $80,000-plus per year councilmembers receive as salary.
A state program that’s set to lower Western Carolina University’s tuition to $500 per semester could have unintended consequences when it comes to the university’s summer programming.
Two Cherokee men have been arrested in connection with wildfires set on the Qualla Boundary this fall.
Two juveniles have been arrested in Tennessee for allegedly starting the Chimney Tops 2 Fire, which ballooned to encompass more than 17,000 acres and led to the deaths of 14 people after hurricane-strength winds swept it through Gatlinburg and parts of Pigeon Forge Nov. 28.
Approval of a 38-home subdivision in Cullowhee has served as a catalyst for the Jackson County Planning Board to revisit the county’s steep slope ordinance, a controversial piece of legislation that passed in 2015 after nearly three years of heartfelt debate. If the last few planning board meetings are any indication, the next round of steep slope discussions will also be a lengthy and complex conversation.
Over the course of thousands of years lived in the Southern Appalachian mountains, the Cherokee people had pretty well developed a system of relationship with the land that ensured they harvested what they needed to live while leaving enough to ensure future generations would yield the same benefit.
But then there was the arrival of Europeans, years of conflict, the removal, and the establishment of the Qualla Boundary under the supervision of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It’s been a long time since Cherokee land was truly managed in the Cherokee tradition, but with the impending approval of a new forest management plan the pendulum is swinging back closer than it’s been in a long time.
GATLINBURG — It started with an ember.
One single ember, falling from the sky into Michael Luciano’s front yard in Chalet Village in Gatlinburg.
GATLINBURG — Just before hitting the McDonald’s along U.S. 321 east of Gatlinburg on Dec. 2, traffic slows to a crawl. Then, to all but a stop. Hundreds of homeowners, business owners and residents line up in anxious anticipation as to what they’ll find when they finally make it through the checkpoint. An intact home, landscaped with magically unsinged shrubs? Or a pile of ash, nothing left except perhaps a few concrete steps leading to a nonexistent porch?
GATLINBURG — Coaches and team jerseys were absent from Rocky Top Sports World Friday morning, but the sports-complex-turned-Red-Cross-shelter surged with activity as Dec. 2 began.
It took mere hours for the Chimney Tops 2 Fire to escape the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and sweep down to engulf parts of Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge Monday, Nov. 28. But as wind fueled the roaring fire, rain was on its way. The first drops of precipitation fell late Monday night, continuing into a steady rain Tuesday morning. More rain came on Wednesday, and precipitation resumed Sunday, Dec. 4, with rain still falling as of press time Tuesday, Dec. 6.
Making their way around a room studded with tables, informational posters and documents for review, Jackson County residents took advantage of their first opportunity — Tuesday, Nov. 29 — to see where county leaders envisioned steering the county over the next 25 years.
The Fourth of July, 1976, was just around the corner when George and Elizabeth Ellison embarked on a hike that would change their lives forever. The two were walking in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park when their wandering brought them to the park’s edge, a remote and beautiful cove with a bubbling stream flowing through it.
SEE ALSO: Ellison releases new title
When George Ellison first started writing nature columns for the Asheville Citizen-Times back in 1986, it was with the assumption that, while he enjoyed such things, reader interest was likely limited and the column would be a short-lived venture. So, when the editor called him in to talk, Ellison was surprised to get not a polite goodbye but promotion to permanent status. The resulting column, “Nature Journal,” is still published today.
Just as wildfires were beginning to subside in North Carolina, gusty winds whipped a flare-up in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park into a frenzy that climbed down the mountain to enter the town of Gatlinburg and spur forced evacuations around the area.
Cold temperatures have arrived, but efforts to ensure the future of Jackson Neighbors in Need are heating up.
Armed with five-gallon buckets and a groundswell of energy, 14 teens from Balsam-based SOAR Camp descended on Eugene Christopher’s Waynesville farm this month with a simple task before them — feed the hungry of Haywood County by collecting as many potatoes as possible.
Clouds hung low over the waning daylight Nov. 11, air slightly hazier than usual from the smoke of nearby wildfires. The leafless November scene could have been a bleak one but for the liveliness of the soundscape, which featured the back-and-forth banter of high school kids freed from the rules of volume control that govern a typical school day. The rumbling of Christopher’s tractor served as the background to their shouts as he traversed the rows, turning the soil for harvest.
As the saying goes, change is life’s only constant — so Jackson County is looking for input to guide its approach to the changes that the next 25 years are likely to bring.
Despite gusty winds, dust-dry forests and interminable drought, firefighters made significant headway over the last week toward containing Western North Carolina’s explosive wildfire season, jumping on new starts to keep their acreages low and limiting existing fires to minimal acreage growth.
It’s a sunny day at Haywood Community College, light sparkling from the campus’s landmark mill pond and shining through the leaves still clinging to the archway of willow oaks lining the school’s entrance drive. The campus lawn is covered with leaves fallen from the towering white oaks dominating it, academic buildings nestled naturally into the folds of the landscape.
In many ways, it looks more like a park than a campus, and that’s by design — the design of Doan Ogden, that is. Ogden, a nationally known landscape architect, designed gardens and landscapes throughout Western North Carolina after moving to teach at Warren Wilson College, and the grounds of HCC are among his accomplishments.
Haywood County listeners accustomed to tuning into 95.3 FM for their National Public Radio fix will have to look elsewhere on the dial after Asheville-based WCQS switches its Waynesville broadcast to 102.9 FM, beginning Friday, Nov. 18.
Tempers flared in Cherokee Tribal Council this month as some councilmembers alleged that a subset of their colleagues had gone rogue, holding backroom meetings in which they decided to subpoena tribal departments for sensitive information as part of investigations launched without the knowledge of the full council.
Home to the Hancock family for generations, the hills and hollows along Silvermine Road are an ingrained identity for siblings Teresa Hancock, Christy Birchfield and Garry Hancock. But this year is the first in their decades of living that smoke has obscured the sky, ash has rained from the air, and flickers of flame have threatened the home that’s served as setting for memories across the seasons of life.
While marked by all the usual trappings of red-white-and-blue-infused color guards, antique cars and patriotic speeches, last week’s Veterans Day celebration in Franklin was a bit more sparse and a bit more somber than typical of the annual event.
As of press time Nov. 15, Western North Carolina was ablaze with 22 wildfires burning through more than 50 square miles in the seven western counties, and while that’s significantly more than the 14 fires that were burning 17.5 square miles at press time last week, firefighters are feeling good about how the week has gone.
From his vantage point on the banks of the Tuckasegee River, it’s not that hard for fly fishing guide Alex Bell to see that there’s something abnormal about the river’s flow this fall.
Sen. Jim Davis, R-Franklin, will keep his seat in the N.C. Senate after an easy victory over Jane Hipps, D-Waynesville, who opposed him for the second election running.
Jackson County government will flip to the Republican side once again following successful campaigns from Ron Mau and Mickey Luker, Republican candidates for county commissioner who managed to oust Democratic incumbents Vicki Greene and Mark Jones.
Kevin Corbin, R-Franklin, will trade in his seat on the Macon County Board of Commissioners for a place in the N.C House of Representatives following a decisive win over the Democratic candidate Randy Hogsed, of Andrews.
Mere months after the much-debated Cullowhee Community Planning Standards became county ordinance, commissioners are set to consider a pair of changes to the rules following a public hearing at 5:55 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 17, in room A201 of the Jackson County Justice and Administration Building.
The first round of soil removal at Southwestern Community College’s lead-contaminated shooting range has substantially reduced the concentration of metal in the soil, but there’s still more work to be done before lead measurements retreat to safe levels.
Billowing smoke and inundations of suited-up firefighters have become the norm for many areas in Western North Carolina over the past couple weeks as tinderbox conditions have lured flames across more than 11,000 acres — about 17.5 square miles — of forested land in the Nantahala National Forest and adjacent private property.
Twice each year, every Cherokee tribal member gets a payout of thousands of dollars — called a per capita payment — based on profits at the two tribally owned casinos.
Nantahala District Ranger Mike Wilkins was headed to church Sunday morning, Oct. 23, when he got the call. A forest fire had ignited the Dicks Creek area of the Nantahala National Forest, near Sylva. Fire Management Officer Greg Brooks was already on the scene, and the response had to start ASAP.
“I was walking out the door, literally on the porch,” Wilkins said. He turned himself around, changed out of his Sunday best and drove out to meet Brooks, sizing up the challenge set before them.
After months of back-and-forth, Harris Regional Hospital and Jackson County have reached an agreement on the hospital’s tax value.
Jackson County may have thought it was finished talking about its steep slope ordinance for a while when a much-debated revision to the document passed in 2015, but the planning board is gearing up to address yet another facet of the ordinance — which ridges in the county should fall under the definition of “protected mountain ridge.”
The Sylva town board has its sights set on making public art a hallmark of the downtown experience, and last week town commissioners sat down to hash out the particulars of what it might take to launch a robust public art program.
Southwestern Community College is gearing up to start work on a $17 million health sciences building, with its trustees last week spending hours listening to pitches from four different companies before selecting the firm LS3P to design the project.
The afternoon of Sept. 27 took an unusual turn in the Cherokee Justice Center when Human Resources Employment Manager Patricia Watkins and a pair of Cherokee Indian Police Department officers arrived to escort Chief Justice Bill Boyum off the premises.
Tension has been high in Cherokee tribal government lately, and when rumors emerged last week that some members of Tribal Council were planning to get Principal Chief Patrick Lambert impeached, it didn’t take long for the gossip to get a public airing.
Western North Carolina is rife with trails and maps to facilitate exploration of the mountain landscape, but an effort is underway to add a new kind of trail to the mix — a blue trail.
“A hiking trail is a great way to help people explore and discover and connect to the land. A blue trail is a way to allow people to discover and explore and connect to rivers,” explained Mandi Carringer, river conservation associate for American Rivers.
