Arts Outdoors

Book Features: Smokies Chronicle

Book Features: Smokies Chronicle

Smokies Chronicle: A Year of Hiking in Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Author, Ben Anderson

As a long-time Great Smoky Mountains National Park volunteer, Ben Anderson had already hiked many, many miles when he developed his plan to spend a year hiking in celebration of the National Park Service centennial in 2016, and to write a book about it. “Many fine books have been written on the Smokies and on the park specifically, but I wanted to write a book that was clearly different from anything that had been published.”

He decided to take day hikes, ten in each of the four seasons, amounting to more than 400 miles on 71 different trails. Along the way, he recorded his adventures and observations in a treasured old notebook, including such incidents as coming upon a playful wild boar.

The book that emerged is memoir, history, field guide and trail guide all in one.

Even armchair explorers will find enjoyment in the book, Anderson says, “as it includes a great deal of human and park history, as well as encounters with—and observations about—fauna and flora. But I hope it will inspire people not predisposed to hiking to try at least a short hike somewhere in the Smokies, as there is typically much to experience away from roads and other developed areas.”

Smokies Chronicle: A Year of Hiking in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, June, 2017, nonfiction, softcover, $19.95, by Ben Anderson, and published by John F. Blair, Winston-Salem, NC.

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