Smoky Mountains News

Great Smoky Mountains National Park is celebrating a major milestone in 2009. The park, established June 15, 1934, will mark its 75th anniversary with a yearlong celebration of the people who made it possible and an emphasis on the stewardship required to keep it viable for the next 75 years and beyond.

In the late 1780s, John Jacob Mingus and his family moved into Oconaluftee, a North Carolina valley that had been Cherokee territory for thousands of years. Among the first known white settlers of the area that would become the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Mingus became a prosperous farmer and miller.

It's been a good year for the small herd of elk in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. National park officials said Thursday that 19 calves were born in 2008 and 16 survived. That nearly doubles the size of the herd from the 52 animals first released in the Cataloochee Valley on the North Carolina side of the park in 2001 and 2002 to an estimated 95 animals today.

It's been a good year for the small herd of elk in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. National park officials said Thursday that 19 calves were born in 2008 and 16 survived. That nearly doubles the size of the herd from the 52 animals first released in the Cataloochee Valley on the North Carolina side of the park in 2001 and 2002 to an estimated 95 animals today.

New regulations allowing people with concealed weapon permits to carry weapons in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park will go into effect in January 2009.

This year, Gatlinburg, Tennessee, perched on the edge of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, is adding some green to its annual Gatlinburg Winter MagicTM holiday display. Making an early New Year’s resolution to be more sustainable, the city converted the display’s 3 million holiday lights from incandescent bulbs to LEDs (light emitting diodes), thus reducing energy costs for the event by approximately 95 percent.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park wildlife biologist Bill Stiver said bear management and education of the public must take place in order to decrease harmful bear and human encounters.

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park will hold the 33rd annual “Festival of Christmas Past” celebration 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Dec. 13. The event is free to the public and will take place at Sugarlands Visitor Center.

As the Great Smoky Mountains National Park prepares to celebrate its 75th year, students of history and geology are pondering questions that go back much farther than the park's creation in the 1930s. The most fascinating queries to them concern the actual formation of the mountains, their age and topography.

Friends of the Smokies announces that noted Waynesville artist Teresa Pennington has created a special edition colored pencil drawing entitled “For the Permanent Enjoyment of the People” to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park.

Layered folds of dusky purple mountain peaks stretch to the horizon, pockets of blue haze softly settling among the ridges. Their outline was bolder and fiercer eons ago when these mountains were younger. But the sharp, angry rock has weathered over the past several hundred million years, yielding the more genial, gently rounded profile it has today.

When Hugh Myers and his wife, Verna, took over Cades Cove Riding Stables in 1965, they started out with eight horses, and the cost of a one-hour trail ride was $2. Today, with 52 horses and two barns, the operation has become the busiest of the four riding stables in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, generating as much as $658,000 in revenue a year.

Layered folds of dusky, purple mountain peaks stretch to the horizon, pockets of blue haze softly settling between the ridges. Their outline was bolder and fiercer eons ago when these mountains were younger. But the sharp, angry rock has weathered over the past several hundred million years, yielding the more genial, gently rounded profile it has today.

The North Carolina mountains got snow overnight and it was still falling at 11 a.m. Tuesday in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park causing officials to close US-441.

Stand atop the observation tower on the highest peak in the Great Smoky Mountains and look out upon the red-and-gold autumnal splendor undulating over lesser mountains in all directions. You might be the artist who lugged a portable easel a half-mile to the tower, where you use a pallet knife to paint a portrait of Mount LeConte. Or you could be the woman breathlessly calling friends on her cell phone to tell them of the mountains' beauty.