When Pete Conroy started pitching the idea in the early 1990s - a national park unit and a state university sharing one building on the rim of an Alabama canyon - nobody could quite see it. Including him. “No one could really wrap their minds around it,” he told me. “And neither could I.” The…
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There are two months in the year when festivals are the most popular in North Alabama. One is May because it’s finally warming up. September is the other because it is finally cooling down. As the temps dip down below scorching, make plans to attend some or all of these fun North Alabama festivals…
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One of Tere Richardson's former board members used to describe downtown Athens in the 1980s like this: on a Friday at five o'clock, he could throw a rock anywhere on the square and not hit anything except maybe a stray dog. This past Friday, 5,000 people were down there. They were eating in the…
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Lake Guntersville State Park doesn't do things small. It sits on 5,900 acres along the shoreline of Alabama's largest lake, all 69,000 acres of it, and somehow still manages to feel like a well-kept secret to the people who haven't been yet. On a recent episode of Unexpected Adventures in North…
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Summer might be winding down, but the fun is still going strong in north Alabama! There are several events across the region that you do not want to miss! Let us know which ones you plan on attending. World's Longest Yard Sale If you love the thrill of the hunt, mark your calendar for the World's…
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Cooper Smitherman left Huntsville for love, not for lack of it. He and his wife were both still in school when she started at the University of West Georgia, so the two of them packed up for Carrollton, Georgia, and spent two years there. It was, in his words, “a great little small-town community.”…
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There are 652 miles of Tennessee River running from Knoxville, Tennessee to Paducah, Kentucky. Two hundred and three of those miles run through North Alabama. And if you grew up here, you already know what that river is. You know it from the camping trips and the fishing and the summer afternoons at…
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From ancient Indigenous civilizations and frontier settlements to world-changing music, Olympic triumphs, and the race to the moon, discover the places that reveal how North Alabama helped shape the American story. America's story isn't told in just one place. It's woven together through countless…
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There are some places that belong to a region the way landmarks belong to a skyline. You do not choose them so much as grow up inside them. For most of North Alabama, Point Mallard Park in Decatur is that kind of place. It was there before we were born. Our parents went. We went. We take our kids…
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There are some people who find music, and there are some people music finds first. Bay Simpson is the second kind. He was born in Florence, Alabama into a family where his mother sang, his father drummed, and the two of them played in a band together. His stepfather is a hit songwriter. His…
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