Gatlinburg, Tennessee

Life is busyness. Life is a grind. Often times, life is merely a string of mundane tasks that demand our attention. Regardless of the path one takes, those truths are inevitable.  But there is always enough time to be intentional about who we want to be and how we want our lives to be lived. Ther...

Sitting on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina, the seemingly endless ridges of the Smoky Mountains attract more annual visitors than any other national park in the country. Don’t let that scare you away, it’s not too hard to find a small piece of the park to call your own for the day. Hai...

Although there was a lack of news coverage, you may have heard of the wildfire that engulfed the Gatlinburg area and Great Smoky Mountain National Park this past November. If not, here's a quick recap.  Tennessee had an extremely dry year in 2016. Small fires broke out here and there but contain...

"The Place of the Blue Smoke" is what the Cherokee tribe called the mountains between Tennessee and North Carolina, thanks to the hazy mist that clings to the peaks and valleys of what is now the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. The Great Smoky Mountains see over nine million visitors per year...

The second film from More Than Just Parks is an homage to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a park with an address in Tennessee, but that straddles the border of Tennessee and North Carolina. This park also has bragging rights as the most visited national park in the United States, according ...

I might be partially biased when I say this, but I strongly believe that fall in the Blue Ridge Mountains is as scenic of a place as any in the world.  With lower elevations than other mountain groups in the States, hardwood forest dominates the mountainsides, meaning that nearly every plant expl...

Hiking the Appalachian Trail (AT) has been a dream of mine for the better part of the last 5 years since I first started backpacking. Like most people with this dream though, I am in a career that doesn’t exactly lend itself to taking five to six months off to plod along in the woods on the way t...