Down at the bottom of the gap, where US-129 crosses the Little Tennessee River, there's a big curved concrete dam called Cheoah Dam. And if it looks strangely familiar, there's a good reason — you've almost certainly seen a man jump off it.
Nineteen ninety-three. The movie was 'The Fugitive,' Harrison Ford as Dr. Richard Kimble, wrongly accused, on the run, cornered at last by Tommy Lee Jones's U.S. Marshal at the top of a dam with nowhere left to go. And in that famous moment, rather than surrender, Kimble spreads his arms and leaps off the dam into the water far below. That dam is Cheoah. Right here. Now — Harrison Ford didn't actually make the leap; they used a stand-in and a dummy for the plunge, and Ford filmed his part on a ledge they built. But the dam is real, and it's the one, and Dragon riders have been pointing at it ever since.
Cheoah's a piece of history in its own right, mind you, long before Hollywood. It was finished back in nineteen nineteen — one of a chain of dams the aluminum company built up this river to make electricity — and when it was completed it was the highest overflow dam in the world. More than two hundred feet of concrete plugging a mountain river.
So it's a double landmark: a genuine feat of old engineering, and the spot where one of the great movie escapes was filmed. Not bad for a dam most folks would drive right past. Next time you watch that leap, you'll know exactly where Kimble jumped — right at the foot of the Dragon.
Photo: own work · Public domain
