The National Park Service has selected LeConte Lodge L.P. as the concessioner for the new contract to provide services at LeConte Lodge in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This contract will be effective for 10 years from 2025 to 2035. 

Visitors should prepare for planned routine road maintenance in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. 

Park maintenance crews will implement temporary, single-lane closures along the north and southbound Spur between Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge through May 1 from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. and then from May 5-8 from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. 

On Sunday, April 27, with the cooperation with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the North Shore Cemetery Association will begin a year of decorations at Branton and Lower Noland Creek Cemeteries.

The four-state mountain region that includes Great Smoky Mountains National Park is home to an estimated 14,500 black bears, but one particular animal had caught the attention of a watchful police chief in one of the park’s gateway communities.

As Spring begins, Great Smoky Mountains National Park reminds visitors of group size limits during the popular wildflower season at Whiteoak Sink. Individuals and small groups of eight or fewer people may access the Whiteoak Sink area throughout the wildflower season Tuesday, April 1, through Sunday, May 4. 

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. 

Mike Meldrum could claim his current occupation as a third career — if he weren’t so careful to avoid calling it a job.

“I want to have fun and feel like I’m doing something worthwhile with my time,” said Meldrum, a former park ranger whose handiwork has raised $37,000 in support of Great Smoky Mountains National Park during the last two years alone.

Mindy Fawver is retired from a career in commercial photography and graphic design, while her husband, Doug Bruce, works as an industrial alignment engineer; neither has a professional background in biology, conservation, or taxonomy. But together, the couple has documented more than 60 species in Great Smoky Mountains National Park never before recorded there.

Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation supplied funding to help a collaborative partnership conserve 406 acres of habitat for elk, whitetail deer, wild turkey, grouse and other wildlife in Western North Carolina.

Often called “America’s best idea,” the National Park System founded more than a century ago has given generations of visitors from across the country and the world a unique opportunity to come together amid the bountiful natural beauty and historical dignity this nation has to offer.