Go there
I go in person and I keep track of the date. Sometimes I go back in different weather because a forest road in a downpour can be a very different road from the one I saw on a dry day.
Asheville Insider's Guide
I'm a photographer, naturalist, and wildlife enthusiast. If I write a guide here, I have been there with a camera. I walk the road, check the water, photograph what I find, and put a date on it so you know when those conditions were actually observed.
The short version
Asheville Insider's Guide is not built from scraped listings. The guides come from places I have visited myself, usually with a camera in my hand and a date attached to the visit.
Why this site exists
I love Asheville and Western North Carolina, and I want people who come here to have a good trip. I'm also a naturalist and wildlife guy, so writing about these places gives me an excuse to share the things I pay attention to anyway. Getting people outdoors is the point of the site.
The problem is that outdoor information goes stale. Sometimes it was wrong to begin with.
I run into the same thing all over Pisgah. An official page still describes a ford even though a bridge has been there for years. A campground listing says there is no drinking water, but the spigot works when I am standing beside it. Other sites copy the same paragraph from one another, and the photos may be ten years old with no date anywhere.
That is why I go look for myself. I photograph what is there, record the date, and say plainly when what I saw does not match an official source.
How a guide gets made
I use the phrase "field-checked" a lot, so this is what I mean by it.
I go in person and I keep track of the date. Sometimes I go back in different weather because a forest road in a downpour can be a very different road from the one I saw on a dry day.
I take the pretty photos, but I also photograph the potholes, gates, toilets, parking areas, and stretches of road people usually leave out. Those are often the photos that are most useful when you are deciding whether to go.
If a listing says there is water, I turn the tap. If it says you have to ford a creek, I walk the crossing and measure it. If I cannot verify something myself, I say where the information came from instead of pretending I did.
I keep the GPS coordinates and capture times with the files. The date matters because a road, campground, or creek can look very different six months later.
If the Forest Service and Recreation.gov say different things, I point out the disagreement. I do not pick whichever answer makes the page cleaner.
Conditions change, especially in the mountains. I tie observations to the day I made them so you can decide how much weight to give them later.
I am the dispersed camping and trails person. Julie knows developed campgrounds and RV travel much better than I do. She notices the things that matter when you are backing a trailer into a site, figuring out whether a campground works for a group, or trying to avoid a miserable setup. When I write about a developed campground, a lot of that practical read comes from her.
She is also part of the naturalist field work and has been since the years when we were breeding marine fish together.
I do not use affiliate links, sell sponsored placements as recommendations, or drop in stock photos of places I have never visited. If a guide shows one of my photos, I was standing there when I took it.
Beyond this site
I upload documentary photographs from Western North Carolina to Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license. Some of those images are used on Wikipedia and other reference sites around the world.
My photographs appear in more than 25 Wikipedia articles across 14 languages. I have been contributing to Wikimedia Commons since January 2014.
My dwarf seahorse photograph is used in that species article in six languages, and the island glass lizard photo leads the species article in four language editions. Both came from naturalist work with Julie, not a commercial assignment. A photograph I made of Far View House in Mesa Verde National Park is also the image used on its Wikidata entry.
The Commons archive includes the Blue Ridge Parkway, DuPont State Forest, Pisgah National Forest, Great Smoky Mountains landscapes, and the communities around Asheville, Hendersonville, Brevard, and Mills River. I also photographed the Moral Monday movement in North Carolina in 2014 and 2015.
Unless a file page says otherwise, I release the work under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Preferred credit is Will Thomas, or Will Thomas, Forge Mountain Photography.
The wildlife side of the site
If one of my guides wanders off into a long section about salamanders, that is not filler. That is probably the part I enjoyed writing most.
I have taken part in eastern hellbender field work in Western North Carolina, including counting males and females and testing for chytrid fungus, a pathogen tied to amphibian declines around the world. The animals were returned to the river unharmed.
That is also why I keep telling people not to stack creek rocks. A large flat slab can be a hellbender nest site, and a male may stay with it for weeks.
I have photographed dwarf seahorses, lined seahorses, island glass lizards, and other species in the field rather than in a tank. Several of those photographs are now used as reference images across multiple Wikipedia language editions.
Before photography became the main work, Julie and I bred marine fish. I was the first person to line-breed true Lightning Maroon Clownfish, and many captive-bred Lightning Maroons in the trade today trace back to that original pair.
We have always preferred captive-bred animals over wild-caught ones. We do not collect wildlife. We go out to observe it and photograph it.
Grizzly bears, wolves, and bison in Grand Teton and Yellowstone. Grizzlies make my heart happy. I photograph commercial work to pay the bills and scratch the technical itch. I photograph wildlife because if I did not, I would lose my mind.
What I do for a living
Asheville Insider's Guide is where the outdoor and naturalist work lives. My day job is photography. I have been doing that professionally since 2001 and run two studios from Mills River.
Forge Mountain is the consumer side of the business. We photograph surprise proposals, elopements, and weddings around the Blue Ridge, including DuPont State Forest, Pisgah, the Biltmore Estate, and the Parkway. I have photographed more than 750 surprise proposals.
Julie handles most of the client communication and day-of coordination.
White Bison is the commercial side. We work with outdoor hospitality, healthcare, senior living, multi-family residential, and tourism clients in the Southeast and elsewhere in the country. The work includes photography, video, FAA Part 107 drone work, and Google Street View Trusted virtual tours.
Google contacted me in 2010 to join the program that became Street View Trusted. I later moved onto the Hotels team and photographed for the Choice Hotels and Hilton crews during the national virtual tour rollout. Since then, I have published more than 2,000 tours across six continents.
FAA Part 107 Remote Pilot Certificate, held by both me and my son, who also flies for the commercial work. Google Street View Trusted Photographer, active since 2010. Canon shooter for commercial assignment work. Wikimedia Commons contributor since January 2014. Graduate of the Academy of Richmond County in Augusta, Georgia.
Recent field work
These are some of the places I have visited, photographed, and dated recently.
Elsewhere
If I got something wrong, or a road, campground, or trail has changed since I was there, send me a note. I would rather fix it than leave bad information sitting on the site. When I make a correction, I date it. Email is the easiest way to reach me.