Tail of the Dragon. It's a heck of a name for a road, and folks always want to know who dreamed it up. So let me give you the honest version, because the truth is better than the tall tale.
For most of its life, this was just US-129 — a hard, twisty mountain road that the local Cherokee and the mountain folk had always known, and that most everybody else avoided because it was slow and scary. Then, sometime back, the motorcyclists found it. And riders being riders, they looked at that endless coil of curves on a map, all humped and writhing across the ridges, and somebody said — that thing looks like a dragon. And the name for the road just stuck: the Dragon.
Now here's where it gets specific. In the early nineteen-nineties, a fellow named Doug Snavely started spreading the word — writing it up, pitching it to the motorcycle magazines, telling every rider who'd listen that there was this unbelievable road down at Deals Gap. He's the one who really put it on the map. And then, right around the year two thousand, a couple named Ron and Nancy Johnson, over in Robbinsville, launched a website — TailoftheDragon-dot-com — and gave the whole thing a home, a name, a store, a photo, a legend. And that was it. From a nameless back road nobody wanted, to a bucket-list pilgrimage riders cross oceans to make.
So there's no single genius who coined it — it grew, the way the best names do, out of a bunch of riders looking at a wild road and seeing a monster. And now you're driving right down its spine.
Photo: William Klos from Mason, US · CC BY 2.0
