The Shelton House, which is home to the Museum of North Carolina Handicrafts, opens for its 35th season this summer. 

Undulating mountains surround the town of Waynesville, a welcoming community that is the perfect combination of nature, tourism and Appalachian culture.

Plans are moving forward to convert the old state prison in Hazelwood to a resource center for the hurting, homeless and recently incarcerated. The trio of Christian ministries teaming up to make that happen are already thinking about how they’re going to raise the estimated $300,000 they’ll need to get the facilities up to snuff, but they’re waiting on an official contract to kick their fundraising efforts into high gear.  

For George Thompson, the struggle to understand how a supposedly good God could be so unfair began with his birth. He came into the world just a week after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943, a tragedy in which 14,000 Jews were killed and another 42,000 deported to concentration camps.

Lake Junaluska residents spearheading the annexation effort realized they needed more and better ammunition to prove their case and sway holdouts in the General Assembly to let the community merge with next-door Waynesville.

The large majority of Lake Junaluska property owners and registered voters want to join the town of Waynesville, according to a volunteer petition drive carried out over the last six months.

A telecommunications outage hit the Waynesville area last Thursday evening, knocking out cell phones, TV, Internet and even landlines for thousands of residents.

“One by one, across the county people are realizing on their own that they have no cellular services or voice or data communication tool,” said Greg Shuping, the Haywood County Emergency Services Director.

A man shot up the outside of a Verizon Wireless store in Waynesville last week following a town wide outage of both Verizon service and Charter Cable.

The dual outages cut off communication with the outside world for thousands of residents when their cell phones, TV and internet service went down for a few hours last Thursday evening.

Running downhill with a tray of wine glasses, Janelle Trevino had a simple objective: she didn’t want to drop any.

“It was intense,” Trevino said. “It’s a lot harder than it looks. I was pretty nervous.”

A server at Tipping Point Brewing in Waynesville, Trevino and her three teammates participated in The Greater Waynesville Wine Race on April 26. Taking place on Miller Street in downtown Waynesville, the spectacle, put on by the Relay for Life of West Haywood, brought together a handful of local restaurants to raise awareness of cancer through a fun and unique occasion.

Mountains and rivers shape the landscape of Western North Carolina, but when it comes to recreation programming, counties and municipalities tend to focus on facilities and league sports. Both the town of Waynesville and Jackson County, however, are working to look beyond the status quo to point people toward the beauty in their own backyards.