Take a moment to appreciate the sheer audacity of the road under your tires, because it should not really exist. The Cherohala Skyway took about thirty-six years to build and cost in the neighborhood of a hundred million dollars — which makes it, by some reckonings, the most expensive road ever built in North Carolina, all to connect two small mountain towns most people have never heard of.
Think about what that meant: carving a modern, gentle-graded highway across the top of a wilderness mountain range, more than a mile high, mile after mile, with no towns to serve along the way and brutal weather half the year. Construction crept along, on and off, from around nineteen sixty until the final link was finished and the whole thing was dedicated in nineteen ninety-six. Thirty-six years. Some of the folks who started it did not live to drive it.
So why on earth did they build it? That's the best part, and it's Boone's to tell — because the answer starts with a bunch of small-town folks, a pile of covered wagons, and a genuinely ridiculous idea that actually worked. But every time you ease around one of these smooth, sweeping, impossibly scenic curves, know that it represents thirty-six years of stubborn mountain determination. This road is a monument, and you're driving right across the top of it.
Photo: Brian Stansberry · CC BY 3.0
