Serving Boone, Blowing Rock, Banner Elk, and other towns of the North Carolina High Country | Founded 05-05-05

February 22, 2007 issue

Mountain City Getting Into The Fast Lane—Slowly

Story by Lois Carol Wheatley

If you think life in a small town is dull, try driving down College Street in Mountain City—two narrow lanes with cars parked on both sides of the street—and running slap up against an oncoming 18-wheeler barreling full throttle around any number of blind curves.

In the limited assortment of small-town amusements, cow tipping is the only other option.

TDOT signed a contract in October 2002 to build a 2.9-mile bypass that would reroute traffic that currently comes down from Virginia via Interstate 91 through a narrow, winding mountain pass, through the downtown streets, and spills out onto Highway 421 southbound to North Carolina.

“The whole thinking was trying to get a better way to get through Mountain City, especially with the tractor-trailers coming from Highway 81 to North Carolina,” said Terry Reece, city recorder for Mountain City. “We have a big rock and paving company, Maymead, and they haul rock through this town nine and ten months a year. And we want to get all that traffic out of this city.”

He added that one of those blind curves on College Street (Highway 91) is at the entrance to the high school and middle school complex. So one would think the project would go forward with all due alacrity.

But road construction was stopped in summer 2003 when the owner of a cattle pasture along the route called in the Nature Conservancy to evaluate and protect a rare wetland haven for beavers, ducks, egrets and blue herons. The area contains the marsh marigold (a federally endangered wildflower), 15 different kinds of sedge and a unique concentration of ferns, flowers and grasses, not to mention the artesian hydrology in the area—small springs that bubble up hither and thither and then vanish and reappear through an underlying layer of dolomitic limestone.

It also didn’t help one bit that the route cut a wide swath through the Cherokee National Forest, though that didn’t create nearly the problems that the wetlands inspired.

A full three years was needed to sort all of that out, reconfigure a bend in the road, lay out the plans for a vegetation buffer and secure the necessary permits. In that process, more letters of the alphabet became involved, including TDEC (Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation) and TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority). TVA continues to manage the project.

“Our hope was that we’d be driving on it this year,” Reece said. “The contractor pulled out and the state had to either renegotiate or go back to the same contractor, which is what they decided to do.” Road crews went back to work last August.

The first visible signs of progress after nearly five years of discussion are the orange barrels that recently appeared in the middle of 421, creating a bit of a slalom course near the Highway 67 intersection. Reece explained that the road will be widened in this area and all the trees along that stretch of road have been taken out. The barrels give the contractor the space needed to backfill that area and build a retaining wall.

“Then in front of the park you’ll see the same thing where they detoured the traffic,” he said. “There will be a tunnel so that residents can go from the town to the park and don’t have to cross that five-lane highway.”

The project cost currently stands at $14.2 million with an estimated completion date of May 31, 2008.

“It’s something that we’ve needed for a good while,” Reece said. “Our town will be safer if we can get these 18-wheelers and these rock and asphalt trucks out of here, and the residential areas will quiet down.”

He said the bypass is part of a larger, more long-range plan. Virginia is widening Highway 58 to four lanes, and TDOT hopes to meet that at the state line with a new four-lane highway of its own. This would be an extension of the new bypass that would have to blaze new trails through even more cow pastures, as it would not be feasible to widen the existing corridor.

Highway 91 is a scenic little winding mountain road and is unsuited to interstate commerce. Furnace Creek runs along one side of the road and sheer rock cliffs tower on the other. “You’d never be able to four-lane the current 91,” he said. “You have a Class A trout stream and there would be all kinds of opposition.”

The proposed route for the bypass extension runs up the other side of the mountain range through a rural area locally known as Sugar Creek—where, without a doubt, other environmental and right-of-way issues lurk.

“We may not see that road completed in my lifetime,” Reece said.