Winner of the Thomas Wolfe Award

2023 Phillip D. Reed Environmental Writing Award Finalist

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 112-mile-long Bartram National Recreation Trail loosely follows the route that eighteenth-century naturalist William Bartram traveled in the spring of 1775 as he explored the South Carolina, Georgia, and western North Carolina mountains. Along his way, he provided significant historical accounts and descriptions of the towns and customs of the Middle Town Cherokees and documented the local flora and fauna, along with descriptions of the landscape. In his 1791 publication, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, etc., Bartram's discoveries in the South were published to high praise in both the United States and Europe. Two hundred years later, a consortium of states convened to commemorate the bicentennial of his travels, resulting in a network of historical markers, interpretive walks and trails, and a commitment to keep William Bartram alive in the public consciousness.

This guide to the Bartram Trail, illustrated with more than thirty maps and a pair of Bartram's watercolors, is a comprehensive account of the Bartram National Recreation Trail. More than just detailing day hikes, interesting spurs, and loop hikes on trails connected to the Bartram, Brent Martin also incorporates illuminating cultural and natural histories into each section.

Martin's guide is perfect for those hiking the entire trail as a single experience and for those making day trips. It includes locations for outdoor supplies, lodging, parking, and other relevant outdoor experiences, such as canoeing the Little Tennessee River or visiting the historic Cherokee town sites of Cowee and Nikwasi.

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.