I woke up early on a recent Sunday morning to the familiar rattling of my cell phone.I shook the cobwebs away and reached out, wondering what vastly important fantasy football alert I had just received. Instead, I was met with an image that quickly grabbed my attention. It was a structure fire in downtown Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The pictures showed flame
Lightning bugs are just about everywhere in the United States. However, they are usually much more difficult to detect in some areas. According to the Smithsonian, males flash when they’re in flight to attract females among the Eastern species. However, out West, it’s the females that glow. However, the females glow more faintly and on the ground. What months are
The year was 1989. At the time, I was an eighth-grader at Bachelor Middle School in Bloomington, Indiana. It was my first year at the school. We’d moved to Bloomington that year from a much smaller Indiana town, but I made friends fairly easily. We moved a lot when I was a kid. Bloomington is a college town, a little
Cades Cove is a national treasure that is rich in history, a jewel of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. But Rex Caughron doesn’t bother much with going anymore. “Very seldom do I go through the Cove,” he said. “It don’t look like Cades Cove to me.” In another life, Cades Cove – or at least a hefty piece of
It’s not often we get a glimpse into the road not taken. There was a movement in the early 1900s to preserve the beauty of the Great Smoky Mountains and create the national park. But that movement came with consequences. Whether those consequences were good or bad depends on your point of view. Ultimately, people lost their homes, their land
If we’re going to talk about the “rash” of bear attacks and bear encounters in and around the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, then we may as well start with this: The remains of a friend of mine from high school were found down a ravine in Blount County earlier in the year. He’d been partially consumed by animals, presumably