The Wilderness Gallery, LLC

As part of the ongoing recovery effort in western North Carolina, we are partnering with our neighbors Vintage Market Marion/ Marion Furniture Company. Please consider purchasing a raffle ticket.

Message me if you purchase a ticket. As a thank you, I will extend a 10% discount on any purchase from me through the end of 2025.

Thank you.

~Western NC Hurricane Recovery Raffle and Fundraiser~

We'd like to invite you to help us support the continued disaster recovery efforts here in Western North Carolina. Enter our raffle for a chance to win a beautiful 28”x35" photographic print valued at $1,400—which has been donated by C.W. Banfield, a local artist and landscape photographer who uses large format film to capture his work. C.W., owner of The Wilderness Gallery (hibiscus-hawk-rhsa.squarespace.com), is one of our vendors here at Vintage Market Marion.

Raffle tickets are $20 each. 100% of donations will go to recovery efforts in Western North Carolina. We will draw the lucky winner on December 16, 2024, at 5:00 PM, and we will post the winner on Facebook and contact the winner directly. You do not have to be present to win.

Options for entering the raffle:

In-Person: Drop by our business at 21 W Court Street in Marion, NC and purchase your raffle ticket. Cash and card are accepted.

Online: Make a direct donation to Samaritan’s Purse (https://shorturl.at/ppQtB) or Red Cross (https://shorturl.at/msoJI) for disaster relief between the dates of November 11 and December 15. Send us a copy of your donation receipt along with your cell phone number to our email at [email protected]. You will receive one entry into the drawing for each $20 increment donated.

Phone: Give us a call at 828-559-2700. We will process your debit or credit card raffle donation payment over the phone.

Other direct pay options (Venmo, Paypal, Cash App, or Apple Cash): DM or call (828-559-2700) us for contact information.

If paying by any method other than in-person, we will fill out your raffle ticket(s) and text you a photo of your completed raffle ticket(s).

The framed print can be shipped within the continental United States.

Thank you to C.W. for his donation, and thank YOU for helping us help our Western NC neighbors!

I took this photograph on a hot afternoon above Lemhi Pass. Tired, lost, and nearly out of water, we were searching for the spring that Merriweather Lewis had, in 1805, mistakenly identified as the most distant source of the Missouri River. Lewis was wrong, but the water’s journey from that remote hillside in Montana’s Bitterroot Range to the Atlantic Ocean remains epic. The meager issuance that starts in a grassy meadow is fortified by other tributaries until it becomes the Missouri River just northwest of Bozeman. From there it crosses the northern plains to merge with the Mississippi River at St. Louis before ultimately emptying into the Gulf of Mexico below New Orleans.

In 1996, Stephen Ambrose’s “Undaunted Courage” had sparked renewed interest in the Lewis & Clark Expedition. Flush with publicity, Lemhi Pass and its spring attracted a smattering of history/geography-nerds via a dirt road. Still, we were surprised to see 20+ cars parked along the road’s edge as we emerged from the woods. Almost immediately, we encountered a group in formal attire. Ominously, one was carrying an urn.

Minutes later, at the spring, we discovered the urn’s contents in our water source. We dubbed him “Uncle George” and unceremoniously extracted him from our water. Next, with bare hands, we dug out and dammed a pool a couple feet upstream, waited for the mud to settle, and filtered from the upper pool. I’ve drunk a lot of questionable water in my travels, but thankfully this was the only time I had to remove a body from it.