Spring is here, bringing with it ample opportunity to get outside, stretch your legs and enjoy the abundance of wildflowers and other plant life in the Southern Appalachians. 

Flitting about her apartment on Vancouver Island, Melissa McDevitt had already packed her bag in preparation for the long journey from Canada’s west coast back to Haywood County. 

Readers are now likely to be searching their own minds for the meaning of the term “boomer inn.” Could it be a hotel or boarding house? Maybe the name is associated with the generation of people known as baby boomers following World War II.

Monday afternoon. Plattsburgh, New York. Grabbing a few things for my intended hike up near Tupper Lake, in the depths of the Adirondack Mountains, I walked out the door of my parents’ farmhouse just as my mother asked where I was going.

During his 30 years living and teaching in Western North Carolina, Maurice Phipps has heard countless tales of tragedy and near misses set in the Southern Appalachian backcountry — people falling off waterfalls , shivering in the cold  while awaiting rescue after a wrong turn on the trail, or logging hair-raising experiences with wildlife .

What’s that feeling the day before a big trip? More so, a road trip? Where you’re mulling over what to pack and what to not forget to do before you leave town — your friends and all things familiar now in the rearview mirror.

Baker Perry’s family arrived in Haywood County almost by accident. They’d been living in Bolivia, where his parents operated a nonprofit today called Curamericas Global, when political problems forced them to leave. His grandparents had a house at Lake Junaluska, so not knowing where else to go, the Perry family moved in.

As Earth Day bloomed under one of spring’s sunniest skies yet, more than 150 people gathered on a concrete bridge spanning Hominy Creek just outside Canton to celebrate what Mayor Zeb Smathers termed a “gift of genesis” — the long-awaited opening of Chestnut Mountain Nature Park .

Jutting off from the left side of a typically busy Blue Ridge Parkway pull-off overlooking Mills River, an unassuming dirt path dips into the woods and winds its way east, just out of view of the famed scenic drive.