Retracing The Trail Of Tears And Summertime Stargazing, This West Virginia Morning

On this West Virginia Morning, a group of bicyclists from the Cherokee Nation have spent the last four decades taking an annual ride spanning nearly 1,000 miles, from New Echota, Georgia to Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Between 1830 and 1850, the United States government forcibly displaced roughly 60,000 Native Americans along this route — an arduous journey that claimed thousands of lives.

The present-day bike ride retraces the northern route of the Trail of Tears, with participants honoring the ancestors forcibly removed from their homelands. WPLN’s Cynthia Adams caught up with the group on the fifth leg of their journey, and brings us this report from the heart of Tennessee.

Also in this episode, we have new stargazing tips from radio and television program Almost Heavens. Shannon Silverman, an astrophysicist at the Clay Center in Charleston, guides us through the cosmos above the mountains of West Virginia, and tells us what you can see with the naked eye in the summer sky.

West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, which is solely responsible for its content.

Support for our news bureaus comes from Shepherd University and Marshall University School of Journalism and Mass Communications.

Maria Young produced this episode.

Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning