Holly Kays

1 week ago | smokymountainnews.com | Holly Kays

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.

2 weeks ago | smokieslife.org | Holly Kays

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.

3 weeks ago | smokieslife.org | Holly Kays

Every time I make the 500-mile trek north to my childhood home, I feel the tug of forgotten familiarity—the grassy backyard extending to a forest that’s roughly the same age as me, my grandfather’s nature photography hanging on the wall behind the kitchen table, the smell of home cooking, wooden floors, and years of intermingled lives I encounter nowhere else. Springtime in the Smokies elicits similar emotions.

1 month ago | smokieslife.org | Holly Kays

Karen Spears Zacharias was 40 years old when she published her first book, but the seed that swelled into her latent identity as a writer was planted decades earlier, in the summer of 1966. After her father died in the Vietnam War, Zacharias, then nine years old, was sent to Tennessee to stay “in the way back holler of a place called Christian Bend” with her great-Aunt Cil. “There wasn’t a lot to do there other than to spend time with Aunt Cil, listening to her stories,” Zacharias said.

1 month ago | smokymountainnews.com | Holly Kays

Outdoors Latest Word from the Smokies: For bears, relocation is no happily ever after 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. The bear hadn’t hurt or threatened anybody — yet — but it kept getting into things it shouldn’t, and efforts to encourage residents to secure attractants like...