A place apart

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is many things to many people. A place of refuge, a keeper of history, a home to wildlife, an engine for tourism. But every park admirer holds one view in common. The park is a sanctuary. May its streams always be clear, its forests lush and its ridges endless.

Jerry Span, 30, Fontana • Outdoor program director for Fontana Village

“One of the biggest things when I go out in the park, I feel closer to God. It is a spiritual, peaceful place for me. Everything is beautiful about it. To see how the mountains were shaped, it is amazing and breathtaking. Most of my rewards when hiking are when I’m on top. I love balds. When you are that high up and looking down into the valley you think, ‘Man, I am so small, so tiny in this world.’

When you have to do it for your job, you start to not appreciate it. On my last hike, I had done a 14-mile hike the day before and was doing a 12-mile hike that day, and just thought ‘Ugh, I don’t want to do this anymore.’ Then I heard something and decide to stop and listen for a good minute. I shut my eyes and just tried to listen to the woods. It put me in my place.”

George Ellison, 67, Bryson City • Author and naturalist

“The Smokies themselves are one large mountain island, with great, great diversity in what is relatively speaking a small area that people can experience. They are grand mountains, elegant mountains, not fierce like the Rockies. It is going to become more important as a place of refuge as time passes. The amazing thing is those people who established it had the vision. It is wondrous it was here in the first place and that it has been preserved. It’s part of our identity.”

Joyce Dugan, 60, Cherokee • Director of Communications and External Relations, Former Chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians

“As a tribe in these United States, our role should always be about the protection of the earth. That’s what we stood for: not taking from the earth anything you could not use and always giving back. But we have adopted so many modern ways, we tend to abuse it, too. The park serves as a reminder to us of what preservation is all about. 

I think sometimes personally, ‘What if that park had not been designated? What would it look like?’ I just can’t imagine. Even though there have been resentments along the way — because of the loss of hunting and gathering uses that we see as our rights as natives — we know what a wonderful thing it was. We can still witness the beauty of the mountains like nowhere else. In that respect, most all of us here who are Cherokee appreciate that.”

Julie Spiro, 41, Sylva • Executive Director of the Jackson County Chamber of Commerce and Travel and Tourism Authority

“The Great Smoky Mountains National Park has name recognition not only all over America but internationally. We are often people’s home base while they are out exploring the national park. If you had to put a dollar value on it, it is literally millions of dollars worth of advertising that we get to take advantage of by being located as a Gateway to the Smokies. We definitely are able to ride on the coattails of the park.

Having such a great resource in our own backyard is a wonderful advantage. People who move here and love the outdoors have a 500,000-acre playground to enjoy. We have the most visited park in the United States at our doorstep, and you can go there any time you want free of charge.”

Bill Gibson, 61, Sylva • Southwestern Regional Commission executive director

“A lot of folks who grew up on the land and of the land would say the intersection with the wild is almost as much primordial as it is learned. I really believe my sense of place in the wild comes to me in my genetic stock. It sustains people like me. I have to have it to survive. It’s my recharge.

When my office was in Bryson City, somebody would call me on the phone and I would be looking out the window and they would say ‘What are you doing?’ I would say ‘I am looking at half a million acres and it belongs to me.’ It would be impossible to create the park today at a half million acres, to put together that kind of place of respite.”

Deener Matthews, 79, Waynesville • Owner of The Swag Inn bordering the park

“The first time we went camping in the park as a family many years ago, we cooked Dinty Moore soup over a fire and it tasted like Beef Bourgeois. It rained and we ended up with a salamander in our sleeping bags. You realize you are part of the earth. The kids loved it. Later on they were always looking for salamanders, and today they take their children out and look for salamanders. 

I can’t think of any bigger treasure than the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. For me, I have gotten so into the rhythm of the seasons of the park, when the bluets come up, when the jonquils bloom, to see the spring ephemeral flowers that come up and go back down into the ground before the trees leaf out. You are just in touch with it. You feel connected with the pulse of the park.”

Teresa Pennington, Waynesville • Artist and owner of T. Pennington Art Gallery

“After church on Sunday when I was a little girl my mom would make fried chicken, and we would pack a picnic lunch and go sit on the Oconaluftee River. My sister and I would play in the horribly, frigid, cold water and build little dams and had the best time. Our vacations were always spent in the Smoky Mountains National Park, too, somewhere in one of the campgrounds. The best stories are about the bears. They were always trying to catch a bear that was mischievous and getting into trouble. When I was a little girl they would let us feed the bears. Of course, they don’t let you do that now.

They say do what you love and the money will come. I have done what I loved in being an artist but also in my subject matter. I love the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. It’s where my heart is. I think people can see that. When I sit in my studio I think back to those times as a little girl. I cherish those memories, and it has really brought me to where I am.”

Greg Kidd, 45, Waynesville • National Parks Conservation Association

“It represents a repository, essentially a bank of biological diversity and habitat, which is getting developed everywhere else. Places like the Smokies are more and more rare. Places where you can find healthy ecosystems existing the way they essentially have for millennia. That’s what makes our national parks so special. Where else will you experience this feeling of being in a primordial forest?

The Smokies is our most visited national park, but for whatever complex of reasons, once you get more than three or so miles from a trail head, you very quickly find yourself without a whole lot of people around. You can very quickly find solitude in the Smokies. That is certainly something that is important to me. It gives me a chance to relax mentally, forget about the worries and stresses of day to day life. It is incredibly meditative. I can just walk and think, and drink in the beauty of the place.”

Ken Wilson, Waynesville • Former newspaper publisher and outdoor photographer 

“One of my more memorable moments as a photographer in the park would have to be in Cataloochee. The sun was just coming up and the elk were grazing in the distance. A yearling black bear was quartering the meadow. It was in the fall because the meadow and sedge was in golden and brown hues. The bear was looking for hornets’ nests or anything else in the grass it may eat. I could hear in the distance across the meadow coyotes calling back and forth. This bear just kept quartering back and forth and getting closer and closer to me. I was out there in the middle of this natural scene and really was an observer. What was going on was going on whether or not I was there. I was a spectator of this wonderful environment.”

Mary Ellen Hammond, 53, Bryson City • Co-owner and editor of Milestone Press

“I can see the park across the lake from my living room window and from my office. I feel like I have this personal relationship with the park. We look out and say it’s raining in the park or snowing in the park. I think there is a tendency to take it for granted sometimes, and then I wake up and realize ‘Wow this is great.’ It is remarkable. I think it is only going to become more important to us as time goes on environmentally.

You can drive through the park and most people do, but going through the park on foot is a different experience because you really get to know the lay of the land. There is something about backpacking and carrying all my things with me and being out far away from everything that makes me feel unfettered. Time gets very spacious and all things seem possible.”

Michell Hicks, 44, Cherokee • Principal Chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians

“Looking down in the valleys, even though there was a lot of tragedy that occurred, there is still a lot of pride. I see what my ancestors would have seen for hundreds of generations before the arrival of the logger and other widespread development that has so dramatically changed the land everywhere else. Very few places in America appear today as they did hundreds of years ago. Preserving this scene is as important today as it was when the park idea first emerged almost a century ago. The park helps keep us whole by protecting the historic landscape of the Cherokee.”