George Masa's Wild Vision recounts the incredible, overlooked life of the photographer George Masa. Self-taught photographer George Masa (born Masahara Iizuka in Osaka, Japan), arrived in Asheville, North Carolina at the turn of the twentieth century amid a period of great transition in the southern Appalachians. Masa's photographs from the 1920s and early 1930s are stunning windows into an era where railroads hauled out the remaining old-growth timber with impunity, new roads were blasted into hillsides, and an activist community emerged to fight for a new national park. Masa began photographing the nearby mountains and helping to map the Appalachian Trail, capturing this transition like no other photographer of his time. His images, along with his knowledge of the landscape, became a critical piece of the argument for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, compelling John D. Rockefeller to donate $5 million for initial land purchases. Despite being hailed as the "Ansel Adams of the Smokies," Masa died, destitute and unknown, in 1933. In George Masa's Wild Vision: A Japanese Immigrant Imagines Western North Carolina, poet and environmental organizer Brent Martin explores the locations Masa visited, using first-person narratives to contrast, lament, and exalt the condition of the landscape the photographer so loved and worked to interpret and protect. The book includes seventy-five of Masa's photographs, accompanied by Martin's reflections on Masa's life and work.

"The Appalachian Mountains attracted an endless stream of visitors in the twentieth century, each bearing visions of the realm that they would encounter on high. The name "Appalachia" became shorthand for a series of moral and economic calculations and pop culture references. Well before large numbers of tourists took to the mountains in the latter half of the century, however, networks of missionaries, sociologists, folklorists, doctors, artists, and conservationists made Appalachia their primary site for fieldwork. Proving Ground studies a collection of these professionals in transit to show that the travelers' tales were the foundation of powerful forms of insider knowledge. The visitors represented occupational and recreational groups that used Appalachia to gain precious expertise, and it was to these groups that they became insiders. They were not immersing themselves in a regional culture, but rather in their own professional cultures. These were people who used the mountains to help themselves. Proving Ground is a cultural history of expertise, an environmental history of the Appalachian Mountains, and a historical geography of spaces and places in the twentieth century. By using these frameworks to analyze the personal papers, professional records, and popular works of these budding experts, the book presents mountain landscapes as a fluid combination of embodied sensation, narrative fantasy, and class privilege. It will attract students of Appalachian Studies who are interested in the phenomena of cultural and environmental intervention, environmental historians concerned with the construction of hybrid landscapes, and mobility scholars who recognize the organizational power derived from access and movement"--

Best known for Our Southern Highlanders (1913) and Camping and Woodcraft (1916), Horace Kephart's keen interest in exploring and documenting the great outdoors would lead him not only to settle in Bryson City, North Carolina, but also to become the most significant writer about the Great Smoky Mountains in the early twentieth century. Edited by Mae Miller Claxton and George Frizzell, Horace Kephart: Writings extends past Kephart's two well-read works of the early 1900s and dives into his correspondence with friends across the globe, articles and columns in national magazines, unpublished manuscripts, journal entries, and fiction in order to shed some deserved light on Kephart's classic image as a storyteller and practical guide to the Smokies. The book is divided into thematic subsections that call attention to the variety in Kephart's writings, its nine chapters featuring Kephart's works on camping and woodcraft, guns, southern Appalachian culture, fiction, the Cherokee, scouting, and the park and Appalachian trail. Each chapter is accompanied by an introductory essay by a notable Appalachian scholar providing context and background to the included works. Written for scholars interested in Appalachian culture and history, followers of the modern outdoor movement, students enamored of the Great Smoky Mountains, and general readers alike, Horace Kephart: Writings gathers a plethora of little-known and rarely seen material that illustrates the diversity and richness found in Kephart's work.

Explore this section of the Appalachians in these essays examining its history, its wilderness, and what change means for its future. In the eighteenth century, naturalist and artist William Bartram traveled in the Blue Ridge Mountains and spent time documenting both plant life and the customs of the Middle Town Cherokees. Since that time, men and women like Bartram have journeyed through Western North Carolina’s wildest and most remote places and written about their experiences. The essays in this volume compare the present day to those historical journeys and explore the idea of wilderness and what change means for the future of the people and the species who live in the mountains. Join local writer and guide Brent Martin on a journey through this incredible landscape. “With unflinching candor, Brent Martin celebrates the heartbreaking beauty of Appalachia. He wrings out every sensory and emotional detail in these passionate, probing essays that explore the wild within. These aren’t lyrical paeans to nature; they are gritty, gutsy journeys into the rugged, remote landscapes of the human heart. Immersed in mountain tradition, culture, and community, he wanders deep and alone into the wild to find what remains. Martin’s powerful, masterful writing shines with real, hard-earned hope.” —Will Harlan, author of the New York Times bestseller Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America “If you love the Southern Appalachians and Wendell Berry and Annie Dillard and Gary Snyder, read this beautifully written and deeply thought-provoking book.” —Charles Frazier, author of the New York Times bestseller Cold Mountain “A thoughtful and thought-provoking collection of essays from one of Appalachia’s staunchest proponents of wilderness and one of its most devoted writers. Brent Martin is a preeminent naturalist and a scholar of the history of his place. This book is deeply personal, highly instructive, far-reaching.” —Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood “A loving a troubling portrait of the southern Appalachians—the rich history and complexity of ecosystems alongside the damage we’ve wrought on them.” —Catherine Reid, author of Falling into Place: An Intimate Geography of Home

The author of the controversial bestseller Brain Trust brings his scientific expertise to the chilling true story of unexplained phenomena on Utah's Skinwalker Ranch -- and challenges us with a new vision of reality. For more than fifty years, the bizarre events at a remote Utah ranch have ranged from the perplexing to the wholly terrifying. Vanishing and mutilated cattle. Unidentified Flying Objects. The appearance of huge, otherworldly creatures. Invisible objects emitting magnetic fields with the power to spark a cattle stampede. Flying orbs of light with dazzling maneuverability and lethal consequences. For one family, life on the Skinwalker Ranch had become a life under siege by an unknown enemy or enemies. Nothing else could explain the horrors that surrounded them -- perhaps science could. Leading a first-class team of research scientists on a disturbing odyssey into the unknown, Colm Kelleher spent hundreds of days and nights on the Skinwalker property and experienced firsthand many of its haunting mysteries. With investigative reporter George Knapp -- the only journalist allowed to witness and document the team's work -- Kelleher chronicles in superb detail the spectacular happenings the team observed personally, and the theories of modern physics behind the phenomena. Far from the coldly detached findings one might expect, their conclusions are utterly hair-raising in their implications. Opening a door to the unseen world around us, Hunt for the Skinwalker is a clarion call to expand our vision far beyond what we know.

A collection of captivatingly meditative essays that display a deep understanding of Buddhist belief, wildness, wildlife, and the world from an American cultural force. With thoughts ranging from political and spiritual matters to those regarding the environment and the art of becoming native to this continent, the nine essays in The Practice of the Wild display the deep understanding and wide erudition of Gary Snyder. These essays, first published in 1990, stand as the mature centerpiece of Snyder's work and thought, and this profound collection is widely accepted as one of the central texts on wilderness and the interaction of nature and culture.