The Pigeon River is lovely, but the interstate next to it is not
Folks who live in western North Carolina or East Tennessee will understand instantly what I am talking about when I say “Pigeon River Gorge.” They know—I’m not talking about the river, I’m talking about the highway. The portion of I-40 that runs through it is one of the most dangerous sections of interstate in the country—it has been documented.
God did not intend for an interstate to go through there. He gave His blessing to, for instance, I-80 in western Nebraska. But His wrath was stirred when highway builders decided to connect Asheville and Knoxville with an interstate. From the moment the road was opened, He started flinging rocks down on vehicles. The rockslides have been incessant. The one last month only closed the highway for a week. The one before that closed it from November 2009 to April 2010.
Geologists say the problem is a particularly crumbly type of metamorphic rock. I don’t think geologists generally make value judgments about rock—they don’t say one kind of rock is “better” than another kind of rock—but in what I’ve read about the rock along the gorge, they seem to be saying, “This rock is just basically crappy.”
Besides wondering if a giant boulder is going to bounce onto the top of your car, the other thing about driving the Pigeon River Gorge is the weird setup of the road itself. It has a big concrete divider in the middle, and trucks are prohibited from the left lane through the whole stretch that twists and turns through the gorge. You are constantly going around a corner and passing long caravans of trucks in the right lane that have gotten stacked up behind a slow one. When you are going around a tight curve with that concrete barrier only a few feet away on your left and a giant truck on your right, you might get to feeling claustrophobic.
For a YouTube video of driving through the gorge, go here. You’ll notice how the car in the left lane was hesitant to pass the truck in the tunnel.
A few weeks ago I was driving through there to meet up with some people for a hike in the Smokies. I’d gotten into the stretch with the really tight curves, and what did I see in the right lane but one of those vehicles with a big yellow sign on the back that said “WIDE LOAD.” And then I spotted the problem vehicle ahead—a trailer carrying one of those modular homes that is divided in half for transport to its final destination. Haha!
Several large passenger vehicles, such as Lincoln Navigators or Ford F-350 trucks, had decided not to even try to get by, and they were fuming behind the convoy, crawling along at the embarrassingly slow speed of 50 mph. I drive a tiny Toyota Echo, so I figured I could get by. Onward! As I neared the modular home, I saw that it actually projected into the left lane. But my car could fit under it! With that concrete barrier on one side, and the huge trailer on the other, I crept past it. My knuckles were white on the steering wheel.
And then I just started laughing. Hard to explain. Something about the basic physics of it: the highway, the wide load, the barrier. Just say “wide load in the Pigeon River Gorge” to anyone who lives around there, and I’m sure they’ll laugh too.
No matter what happens when the slides shut down the highway, we’ll always have old NC 284 and FS 288 to get us to our destination
Well, yes, that’ll more closely parallel I-40 between Waterville and Cataloochee. But if I was trying to get from Asheville to Knoxville, I’d go through Hot Springs!
Yes I know the Pigeon River gorge very well. My mom lives in New Bern NC so I have been through it over and again for the last 20+ years. I have been through it in good weather and bad. Had a truck I was passing come over into my lane and almost drive me into that beautiful concrete barrier. Have had to take many detours due to rock slides and yes in the 1985 I remember when one of those tunnels collapsed also. The interstate has also slid off the mountainside a time or two after floods. From Wikipedia – “It is reported that a person is 20 times as likely to die on I-40 in Haywood County than they would be to win the Powerball lottery”. God really doesn’t like that road. I have always thought it was a beautiful area and if there wasn’t that ugly interstate it would probably be a joy to explore it. The road being there shuts down that instinct in me for some reason almost totally.
The Asheville Citizen-Times had a good article about the whole history of that piece of I-40. The interstate builders had a choice of going along the Pigeon or along the French Broad—where US 25 and 70 go through Hot Springs. Those are the only two gaps in that region through the big spine of the mountains. For political reasons, they picked the Pigeon River route. But the other route might not have been much better from the geological point of view, and I’m glad it hasn’t been disturbed as much.