That deep green water down in the gorge — the long, still pools you keep catching between the trees — isn't a wild river anymore. It's a river put to work. Underneath those lakes runs the Little Tennessee, and a century ago it ran free down this canyon. Then the aluminum company came looking for cheap power, saw all that water falling through all that mountain, and built a staircase of dams: Cheoah first, back in nineteen nineteen, then Calderwood in nineteen thirty, then Chilhowee in the fifties. Each one throws a concrete wall across the river and drowns a stretch of rapids into a long, deep, quiet lake. They called it the Tapoco Project.
So every pretty lake beside the Dragon is really a machine — a river dammed and stacked into pools, spinning turbines, making power for these mountains and the plants beyond them for a hundred years. It's a strange thing to ride alongside. On one hand, three hundred curves of pure wild thrill; on the other, a river completely harnessed and tamed. The Dragon runs right along the seam between the two — the untamed road and the tamed water — and that might just be the most Appalachian thing about this whole place.
Photo: own work · Public domain
