Moonshiner 28

The Deals Gap Motorcycle Resort at the US-129/NC-28 junction — gas, food, and the meeting point of three legendary driving roads. The addressable start of Moonshiner 28.

Boone Merrick here, and I have been looking forward to this one. Because this road, friend, is my kind of country — outlaw country. These deep, folded, hard-to-reach mountains you're about to drive through were, for t…

Let's talk about the road itself for a second, because it's got a real character. Moonshiner 28 is a driver's road and a rider's road — sixty miles of twisting, flowing mountain highway that motorcyclists have prized…

So let's answer the obvious question first: why 'Moonshiner 28'? Now, I'll be straight with you — the name itself is modern, a brand somebody cooked up not too many years back to draw riders in. But do not let that fo…

The long blue reservoir NC-28 hugs on its western run — Fontana Lake, held back by the tallest dam in the eastern US, with drowned towns and lost roads beneath its surface.

That pretty blue lake you've been driving alongside — Fontana — I told you it was haunted, and now I'll tell you why. Because to build it, they drowned people's homes. Whole communities are under that water, or cut of…

The ancient worn-down ridges of the southern Appalachians — some of the oldest mountains on Earth, and why they look and feel the way they do.

The drowned-towns story has a second chapter, and it might be the maddest, saddest broken promise in these whole mountains. They call it the Road to Nowhere. Let me tell you how a road becomes a monument to a lie. Wh…

Somewhere along this drive you cross an invisible line that a raindrop takes very seriously: the Eastern Continental Divide. It runs right through these mountains, and it's the ridge that decides the entire fate of ev…

Now here's a wrinkle in the moonshine story that I love, because it's so perfectly, stubbornly mountain: the county you're driving through spent most of the last century bone dry, by its own choice — and it may have b…

The Stecoah community and nearby Robbinsville — old Cherokee ground, mountain music, and the Appalachian Trail crossing at Stecoah Gap on the connector road.

Every outlaw country has its outlaw king, and this one had a real one — a man whose name rang from these mountains clear to the newspapers of New York. Let me tell you about Lewis Redmond, the man they called the King…

Somewhere along this drive, the most famous footpath in America crosses your road — or crosses the connector roads right beside it. The Appalachian Trail runs through this high country, and it's worth a thought as you…

Here's a piece of American history that most folks have completely backwards, and I take great joy in setting it straight: one of the biggest sports in this country — stock-car racing, NASCAR — was born, direct and un…

Near Bryson City — a small mountain town on the edge of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, home of a scenic railroad that runs a 'moonshine' excursion up the Nantahala Gorge.

You might wonder where the moonshine came from in the first place — I mean the very craft of it, the knowledge, the pot still, the whole business of turning grain into liquor in a copper pot. It didn't spring up out o…

The Nantahala country — a gorge so deep the Cherokee called it 'land of the noonday sun,' and home to one of America's great whitewater rivers.

If you can pick your day to drive this road, make it a clear one in October — because autumn in these mountains is one of the great natural shows on the continent, and Moonshiner 28 runs right through the heart of it.…

The Nantahala National Forest — over half a million acres, North Carolina's largest, and some of the densest black-bear country in the East.

Franklin, NC — the 'Gem Capital of the World,' where ruby and sapphire mines in the Cowee Valley have drawn diggers since the 1870s, plus the only tartans museum in America.

We'll end the deep history down in Franklin, where you'll find something that stops you cold: a great earthen mound, sitting right in the middle of the modern town, that is a thousand years old — and that, just this y…

And there's Franklin coming up — the end of the shine road, down in the gem country. Boone Merrick here, and it's been a real pleasure telling you these outlaw hollows' tales the whole way down. Roll into town and se…

Franklin, NC (Macon County) — the SE gateway to Moonshiner 28, the Gem Capital, and home of the thousand-year-old Nikwasi Mound. Fuel and food here.