We love our bears here in the Smokies. It’s estimated there are around 15,000 in the four-state area surrounding the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and they’ve become an iconic symbol of the region. 

So, it’s no wonder that of the hundreds of stories we published on The Smoky Mountain News website in 2025, it was one about relocating bears that was the most popular.

What do rangers eat for lunch? How did the Great Smoky Mountains get their name? Do rangers have to feed the bears? Are there alligators in the park? What about moose? Dolphins? 

“The kids really want to know,” said Scott Young, a volunteer at Great Smoky Mountains National Park who, together with his wife Jayne, has answered every letter kids from across the country send to the national park since they first took on the task in 2021.

Backcountry rangers Lydia Williams and Jordan Gibeault have almost reached their destination, Kephart Prong Shelter, when they purposefully veer off trail. They descend a slight hill, emerge into a small creekside clearing, and immediately turn their attention to a rocky outcrop protruding from the hillside. It’s ringed with stones and filled with ash. “This is a great example of an illegal fire ring,” Williams said. “Every time we come here, we’re dealing with it again and again.” 

Flowing over nutrient-rich limestone rock that fueled a diverse assemblage of species, Abrams Creek was once one of the most productive streams in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. That changed in 1957, when wildlife managers intent on expanding opportunities for anglers stocked it with non-native rainbow trout — after applying the fish pesticide rotenone to the entire lower portion of the creek, hoping to protect the trout from competition. Chilhowee Dam was completed later that year, cutting the creek off from downstream fish populations. 

Born from the high, cold springs of Great Smoky Mountains National Park and destined for the Gulf of Mexico, the clear waters of the Oconaluftee River have a long journey ahead. The river flows through the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians’ homeland in Cherokee and joins increasingly voluminous waterways as it travels toward the sea. The Cherokee know this southbound path as the Long Person, yvwi ganvhida — a living being with its head in the mountains and its feet in the sea.

In 1927, a $5 million donation from the richest man in America — the equivalent of $92 million today — secured the Great Smoky Mountains’ then-tenuous future for protection as a national park. But when John D. Rockefeller Jr. agreed to write the check, he had never so much as glimpsed these ancient peaks. Smokies Life’s former publication director Steve Kemp spent years wondering: why?

It’s not yet 9 a.m. on a weekday, but Alum Cave Trail is already bustling. With parking scarce, hikers might walk nearly a mile to reach the trailhead along Newfound Gap Road.

“I’ve probably already talked to 20 people,” says Joshua Albritton, supervisory preventative search and rescue ranger for Great Smoky Mountains National Park, joining PSAR Ranger Cutter Wheeler at the trailhead around a quarter after nine.

Somewhere after 2 p.m. on a sunny Wednesday in mid-March, the chaotic wind of a descending helicopter whipped the calm skies above the Appalachian Trail near Icewater Spring Shelter. Four people — two Smoky Mountains Hiking Club volunteers and two Appalachian Trail Conservancy employees — waited at the intersection of the Boulevard and Appalachian trails, watching the bundle of black locust logs suspended below the chopper come to a gentle rest in the small forest opening.

Every year, millions of people visit Great Smoky Mountains National Park to experience its clear mountain streams, verdant views, and diverse forms of natural beauty. The mountains exert a powerful spell — but too often, that spell is broken by the sight of plastic bottles and candy wrappers scattered beside trailheads and overlooks, fast food bags and old tires flung along roadsides and plastic bags or balloons hung in treetops. 

With wrinkly skin that comes in various shades of brown, eastern hellbenders aren’t easy to spot. These giant salamanders, which average 20 inches in length, spend most of their lives nearly invisible under rocks on the bottom of cool, fast-flowing streams.