Tag: Photography
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Image for the Asking: Why Come It’s Not a Holler Hardwood Forest?
Story and image by Don McGowan
The dictionary of Appalachian English, courtesy of Wikipedia, assures us that a “cove” is a “valley between two ridges.” It goes on to explain that a “holler” is a “valley between two hills.” Now since ridges and hills can be, and on occasion have been, mistaken for
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Image for the Asking: Standing Still behind a Cloud
Story and Image by Don McGowan
Benjamin Morton was a Knoxville businessman, and from 1924 to 1927, he was also the mayor of the city. Such an ardent conservationist and a great supporter of the creation of Great Smoky Mountains National Park was he that an overlook of considerable magnitude on the Tennessee side of the mountains was named in his
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Image for the Asking: Now You See Me; Now You Don’t
Story and Image by Don McGowan
I will always consider one of the singular highlights of my career to have been the opportunity to be a very small part of the elk reintroduction to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I took pictures.
The great bulk of the credit for the work to reintroduce these magnificent creatures lies in the dream and
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Image for the Asking: The Place of the Balsams
Story and Image by Don McGowan
With all of the diverse vegetation that covers Great Smoky Mountains National Park, it is sometimes easy to overlook what is underneath. The under layers of all of that biota are rock strata from the basement of time.
Well, let me be completely honest here: the basement of time that I am referencing has a date on
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Image for the Asking: The Last Log Train from Tremont
Story and image by Don McGowan
It was in December 1938 that the last logging train pulled out of Tremont bearing to the mill at Townsend trees cut by the Little River Lumber Company along Thunderhead Prong of Middle Prong of Little River.
Tremont had been established in 1925 at the confluence of Thunderhead Prong and Lynn Camp Prong, where
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Image for the Asking: One Highway Over the “Too Many Line”
Story and image by Don McGowan
In the late summer of 1934, the National Park Service was actively involved in plans to construct a “ridgeline highway” that would bisect the newly minted Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Already at that time the section of the road from Newfound Gap to Clingmans Dome was under construction; and it
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Image for the Asking: Lichen Tectonics
Rock Breaks Scissors, Lichen Eats Rock
Story and image by Don McGowan
One of the great wonders of our world is the capacity of a simple organism, lichen, to perform amazing feats.
To set the stage for understanding lichen, we need to back up, way up, to a time some 500 million (that’s half of a billion) years ago, when the oldest rocks
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Image for the Asking: Cloud-Hidden in Plain Sight
By Don McGowan
Photographing sunrise in Great Smoky Mountains National Park is an interesting game that might well be called “Where and When.”
Within the park, the two most accessible locations are Luftee Overlook and the Clingmans Dome parking area. Both of these are impacted by seasonal road closures and/or the time of year, which
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Image for the Asking: Peeking Under a Cloud
By Don McGowan
Heintooga Ridge (Spur) Road is technically a spur off of the Blue Ridge Parkway that serves as an entry into Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Along this spur, at 1.3 miles off the main pathway of the parkway, is an overlook that was created in 1952 and is called Mile High Overlook since its elevation is 5, 250 feet (close
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Image for the Asking: White Oak Flats Branch
By Don McGowan
I’m sure you’ve all had “aha” moments in every endeavor you’ve undertaken. I know I have. One of my biggest was when I realized how to make dramatic wide-angle landscape images turn out successfully.
I had realized sometime earlier that photographically we “see” the world in a
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