Menu
News
-
Smokies Scenic Drives for Families: Foothills Parkway
The scenic drives in the Smokies can introduce you to plenty of wildlife, rushing streams, colorful flowers, lush forests, mountain vistas, and historic buildings—all from the seat of your car. To get the full flavor of the Smokies, be sure to park in plenty of the many pull-offs so you can get out and explore on foot as well.
This is
Read more...
-
Trailside Talk: Water Up, Water Down
What is it about flowing water that so many of us find so mesmerizing and magnetic?
The sound? The movement? The fall over a precipice to a pool below? The eternal pounding against rocks that become imperceptibly smoother by the moment?
Whatever the attraction, the Smokies—and, by happy extrapolation, Smokies visitors—are blessed
Read more...
-
Image for the Asking: When the Mountains Speak in Smoke
All parks need friends. In fact, I think it’s reasonably safe to say that without lots of friends, parks as we think of them, especially our national parks, would not exist.
When it comes to our western parks, the simplified story line runs this way: Those spaces were created from lands already within the public domain; we the people
Read more...
-
More Walk, Less Talk: A New Year’s Resolution
By Janet McCue and Paul Bonesteel
“Launched out on an adventure today,” the diary entry read. Masaharu Iizuka, a handsome young man with a wide grin, wrote the passage in Japanese characters on what we think might have been his birthday, January 18, 1915.
To launch his adventure, he boarded a train in San Francisco and headed east
Read more...
-
Science and Education Center Conceived 40 Years Ago
When Great Smoky Mountains National Park put together a general management plan 40 years ago in 1982, included was the skeleton concept of a new laboratory. This lab would meet the needs of a relatively small group of scientists and researchers who were then working out of historic buildings of the Voorheis Estate, located on Cherokee Orchard
Read more...
-
Smokies Scenic Drives for Families: Little River Road
The scenic drives in the Smokies can introduce you to plenty of wildlife, rushing streams, colorful flowers, lush forests, mountain vistas, and historic buildings—all from the seat of your car. To get the full flavor of the Smokies, be sure to park in plenty of the many pull-offs so you can get out and explore on foot as well.
This is
Read more...
-
Echoes in the Mountains: Facts and Curiosities of Elk Biology
Images by Phoebe Carnes
The elk found in the Great Smoky Mountains today are Manitoban elk, or Cervus canadensis manitobensis—a subspecies of elk found in southern Canada, the Midwest, and some parts of the eastern US. Manitoban elk are larger in mass (weighing 500–1,000 pounds), though they possess smaller antlers, an adaptation
Read more...
-
Trailside Talk: Save Our Smokies
I was on a hiking trip with a group of kids last year when we stopped about halfway up a mountain to take a break on a group of large rocks.
As I sat down, I noticed that someone had left a soda bottle near the bottom of one of the rocks, and I took the opportunity to explain to the kids what a wrong decision someone had made. “Always
Read more...
-
Community scientists discover a treasure trove of new Smokies species
Over the past few years, national park visitors helped document a slew of new species records in the Smokies using a community science app called iNaturalist.
Thanks to the app and a community science project called Smokies Most Wanted, more than 70 species were recently added to the list of over 21,000 species known to Great Smoky Mountains
Read more...
-
The Fates lend their voices to new music video benefiting Safe Passage project
The Fates — vocalist and guitarist Natalie Karrh, vocalist, pianist and bassist Lexi McGraw, and vocalist and violinist Bella Wells-Fried (left to right) — captured inside the graffiti-riddled tunnel in Unicoi County, TN, that provides their safe passage under the highway in the new music video “Safe Passage:
Read more...