When the Safe Passage coalition started working in 2017 to make Interstate 40 a safer place for people and wildlife through the Pigeon River Gorge, nobody knew that, in a few short years, entire sections of the critical roadway would vanish in the wake of Hurricane Helene.

The staff of the Smoky Mountain News won 20 combined advertising and editorial awards, including a combined 13 first-place honors, at the 2024 North Carolina Press Association annual awards banquet. Awards were won in Division C, the largest division for nondaily publications. 

At 3:30 p.m., traffic flows smoothly along U.S. 441 past the Oconaluftee Visitor Center. The 80-some elk living in this area of Great Smoky Mountains National Park are still invisible beneath the forest canopy as the sun shines bright and warm. 

Shadows and seasons are the main markers of time in Cataloochee Valley, a remote corner of Great Smoky Mountains National Park located more than 20 miles from the closest town and reachable only by a windy, narrow gravel road. 

It’s a lot quieter this week at The Smoky Mountain News. Not just because of the unusually warm weather this past weekend sparking folks to frolic and head for the hills.

When I first arrived in Western North Carolina just after New Year’s Day, 2014, I wasn’t planning to stay. 

Back when the trip was a new idea, I don’t think either of us took it seriously. Three weeks on the road, at a time when most American cars were sitting idle in the driveway? Thousands of miles of driving through sand and snow, mountain and desert, far from home? Surely this was just a pie-in-the-sky dream borne from the hunger pangs of quarantine, nothing more. 

Years ago, in the parking lot of the Haywood County Public Library, I met a man in his late 20s who worked at the Champion Paper Mill. As we talked about what we did for a living — I was in debt to my eyeballs running a bed-and-breakfast and a bookstore — the man told me that when he was 18 his uncle had helped him buy a house in South Carolina and that he now owned 10 other houses, which he rented out. Fascinated by the history of the West, he made an annual trek every summer to places like Texas and the Dakotas to study first hand what he had read about in books. On his latest expedition he had traveled to the Little Bighorn Battlefield in Montana.

The more you know about the Camino de Santiago, the harder it is to define. 

The simple explanation is that it’s a walking path that travels through Spain. But in reality that description is a mix of truth and fiction. 

My car is usually something of a mess, a magnet for loose papers, empty food wrappers and an impressively random assortment of items packed for some excursion or another but never returned to their proper place. Such was the case the day of my first-ever outing as a big sister with Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, and so I judiciously set aside a few minutes before leaving to clear out the passenger seat — though mostly by tossing all the junk covering it into the back.