Cocke County, Tennessee

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...

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...

This is the first of a two-part series about exploring the Blue Ridge Parkway near Asheville, North Carolina. In this first segment, I’m going to take you to some of my favorite spots heading north out of town along one of the prettiest stretches of road not only in the southeast, but arguably, t...

My girlfriend and I have never been to North Carolina, but we have heard so many good things about Asheville and the Blue Ridge Mountains that we were incredibly excited when we got the chance to check it out. We knew that the Blue Ridge Parkway was a famous drive. One full of epic views and scen...

The trail to town concept sounds fancier than it is. For me, it’s actually not an idea so much as it is my stomach getting what it wants. (And it is VERY persistent in that department). I’ll often have a place to eat or drink picked out well before we’ve even arrived at a trailhead. On those rare...

This is the second in a two-part series about exploring the Blue Ridge Parkway near Asheville, North Carolina. In this segment, I’m going to take you to some of my favorite spots heading south. As I mentioned in the first piece, the Blue Ridge Parkway is a 469 mile stretch of road that connects ...

Looking to escape the cold and head somewhere a little warmer? The Southeast U.S. has a lot to offer from top-notch food joints and cultural experiences to outdoor recreation activities. Here are six places full of charming and vibrant cities, abundant history, unique architecture, beautiful beac...

By now, most of us are familiar with the benefits of parks-they encourage us to get exercise, they help us reduce stress, they foster connections with our communities, etc. But so often when I think of parks I think of the big ones … places like Yosemite and the Grand Canyon … national parks with...

I spend every free moment I can find capturing sunrises, sunsets and the night sky. Follow my road trip guide of the North Carolina mountains to see some of my favorite places through my camera lens.   Sunrise - Waterrock Knob Waterrock Knob isn't known as the place to be for sunrise, which i...