As we enter the holiday gift-giving season, it's time to shine some light on our wonderful local bookstore. This would be City Lights in downtown Sylva, NC. Over the decades, our relationship to the staff at City Lights has been multi-faceted.…
Milestone Press may be an outdoor publisher, but not all our work—and not all our discoveries—happen in the great outdoors. Last weekend we participated in our local library's Read Local Book Fair, where library patrons get a chance to peruse books…
This week marks 25 years since we opened our publishing doors in 1991. That made us wonder: Just how many miles of adventure trails have we covered in our guidebooks over the years? A deep dive into our database yields some numbers we think…
When Milestone Press published Jim Parham's new Tsali Trails Map on April 1 of this year, we pledged to donate a portion of the proceeds toward maintenance of Tsali's trails. This week, we made our first donation from sales of the map, which covers…
Our friend Hawk Hagebak Hawk hails from Atlanta, and his love for the Southern Appalachians brings him and his motorcycle our way every once in a while. Hawk stopped by recently, this time with his wife Lisa and their 16-year-old daughter, Annabelle. They were…
We love where we live and work, but once in a while it’s good to get away. This fall we ventured into new territory: Quebec. To be more specific, the Petit Trail du Nord (Little Train of the North), a…
Most professional photographers, and plenty of serious amateurs, carry professional equipment. That means large tripods, SLR camera bodies, and bulky lenses. But many of us who hike to photograph wildflowers and other natural features don't have the luxury of toting so much weight,…
The photo above shows a perfect cloudless day—great for spending time outside. But when it comes to photographing wildflowers, direct sunlight is not your friend. Of course you need light to take a photo, but direct sunlight is not your friend. This translates…
If you want to photograph wildflowers in the Southern Appalachians, you have to go where they're blooming. And to learn where they're blooming, you have to be thinking about altitude. As outdoor writer Danny Bernstein notes in her first guidebook,…
When we think about a wildflower outing, we tend to think about an excursion on foot, walking a woodland trail in search of, perhaps, a specific species that's known to bloom at a certain time. But how many of us…