A Partner for Parks
National parks tell stories that matter — of ancient fossils and apex predators, of ecosystems in balance and communities that fight to keep them that way. At Smoky Outfitters, we create assets that help protect them.
We've tracked moose in Isle Royale, celebrated Katmai's bears during Fat Bear Week, reconstructed the fossil record in the Badlands, and supported Friends of the Smokies. Our photo, illustration, and film work has appeared in National Parks Magazine, Discover Life in America, and Smokies Life — connecting millions of visitors to the parks they love.
Brothers Jesse and Matthew Brass bring a rare background in Fortune 500 sustainability communications, applied entirely in service of the places worth saving. We translate complex science and deep mission into imagery and story that moves people.
If your park or conservation organization needs a creative partner who understands the work, we'd love to talk.
The Bears: Katmai NP
Fat Bear Week is one of the most beloved events in the national park calendar — a bracket-style competition celebrating Katmai's brown bears as they pack on pounds before winter. We created graphics to support the event, adding visual energy to a campaign that's equal parts fun and vital conservation storytelling.
Walking Dead: Badlands NP
The Badlands don't just preserve fossils — they preserve entire worlds. These stark buttes were once a lush, humid landscape teeming with creatures that look like nothing alive today. We brought three of them back.
The Archaeotherium was a massive, pig-like predator — all jaw and aggression — that ruled the Oligocene landscape as both scavenger and hunter. The brontothere was a rhinoceros-like giant that lumbered through ancient forests before vanishing in one of prehistory's great extinctions. And prowling the shadows was the nimravid, a false saber-toothed cat whose killing tools rivaled anything that ever walked the earth.
These renderings are our attempt to do what paleontology does best: close the distance between deep time and right now.
Parks on Paper: NPCA
Matthew Brass has contributed photography and writing to National Parks Magazine, the flagship publication of the National Parks Conservation Association, spanning more than five years and three very different parks.
His 2019 photographic essay Water, Smoke, Spirit, Forest, Ghost, Land, Sky brought Great Smoky Mountains National Park to life through images that earned second place honors at the North American Travel Journalists Association Awards. In 'Peace, Life & Tingly Happiness' (2023), he and filmmaker Jesse Brass ventured into a winter storm at Badlands National Park — trading their carefully planned itinerary for something wilder and more honest. And in Where the Birches Bend (2024), he chronicled a multigenerational family paddle through Isle Royale, weaving together Robert Frost, cold Superior waters, and the particular way wild places hold memory across generations.
His work with NPCA extends beyond editorial photography — contributing illustration work to an annual report and a series of editorial pieces that help bring conservation stories to life visually.
A fourth feature, blending photography and original illustration in the Hawaiian islands, is coming soon.
So Much for the Smokies: GSMNP
Great Smoky Mountains National Park sits at our doorstep, and that proximity has shaped some of our deepest and most personal work. We've illustrated a book for Smokies Life, created custom retail art that puts the park on walls and shelves across the region, and developed graphics for both the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont and Discover Life in America — two organizations doing essential work to understand and protect the park's extraordinary biodiversity.
When your backyard is the most visited national park in the country, you take the responsibility of representing it seriously.
Albright Grove TS
Charlies Bunion TS
Laurel Falls TS
New Found Gap TS
The Jump-Off TS
Ramsey Cascades TS
Alum Cave TS
Abrams Falls TS
Andrews Bald TS
Cades Cove TS
Elkmont TS
Deep Creek TS
Cataloochee TS
Grotto Falls TS
Smokemont TS
Mt Sterling TS
Mt Cammerer TS
Balsam Mtn TS
LeConte TS
Chimney Tops TS
Big Creek TS
Clingmans TS
Cosby TS
Myrtle Point TS
Gregory Bald TS
Shuckstack TS
Rainbow Falls TS
White Oak Sinks TS
Green Canoe and Moose Counts Too: Isle Royale NP
Isle Royale is one of the most remote and least visited national parks in the country — and one of the most scientifically significant. It's home to the world's longest-running predator-prey study, the Wolf-Moose Project, which has tracked the delicate balance between these two species for decades. We were honored to create assets in support of that work, helping to tell a story that sits at the very heart of what wilderness science looks like.
The island also inspired something more personal. Out of our time paddling those cold Superior waters came Green Canoe, a children's book that captures the wonder of Isle Royale through young eyes — because the next generation of park protectors has to fall in love first.
The NeoNaturalist Ranger Series
The WPA posters of the 1930s didn't just advertise national parks — they made people believe in them. Bold, graphic, and unapologetically beautiful, they turned wilderness into something worth fighting for. The NeoNaturalist Ranger Series is our tribute to that tradition, and our attempt to push it forward.
Each piece distills a park to its essential truth — the particular light, the defining creature, the landscape that makes a place unlike anywhere else on earth. The palette is vintage. The reverence is genuine. The point of view is entirely our own.
Created in partnership with the Creative Action Network on behalf of the National Parks Conservation Association, the series stands at the intersection of art, advocacy, and the enduring belief that beauty is its own form of protection.
