Cherohala Skyway

Cherohala Skyway

30 stops· 49 min· 50.6 mi

Forty-three miles of high, sweeping mountain road between Tellico Plains, Tennessee and Robbinsville, North Carolina — climbing over a mile above sea level across the crest of the Unicoi Mountains, through two national forests, with fifty-mile views and almost nobody on it. This self-guided tour rides the whole Skyway with two park rangers aboard. Ranger Quinn keeps you oriented and safe and tells you what you're seeing — the climb, the overlooks, the grassy balds, and the astonishing thirty-six-year, hundred-million-dollar story of how this road got built at all. Ranger Boone Merrick brings the tales: the covered-wagon stunt that shamed a road into existence, the old Cherokee turnpike that became a Trail of Tears, the chief who saved Andrew Jackson and was made to leave anyway, the escaped wild boar that overran the mountains, and the two men the mountain kept one winter. Drive it in either direction. Fuel up first — there's not a gas pump for forty-three miles. Then climb.