![]() ![]() The Federal government promised to replace Highway 288 with a new road. ![]() The old road was buried beneath the deep waters of Fontana Lake. With the creation of the Park, their homes were gone, and so was Old Highway 288 the road to those communities. Hundreds of people were forced to leave the small Smoky Mountain communities that had been their homes for generations. Fontana Lake is actually a reservoir for Fontana Dam, which was built as a TVA project during World War II to produce electricity for ALCOA aluminum plants in Tennessee as well as for Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Manhattan Project. In the 1930s and 1940s, Swain County gave up the majority of its private land to the Federal Government for the creation of Fontana Lake and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. If you plan to walk through the tunnel you might want a flashlight and be aware horseback riders use the tunnel. Walking through the quarter-mile-long tunnel takes you to Goldmine Loop, Forney Creek (great trout fishing), Lakeshore Trail and other connecting trails. About a half-mile before the tunnel at the end of the road, you’ll find great hiking and trout fishing on the Noland Creek Trail. It provides an overlook of Fontana Lake and access to a number of hiking trails. Lakeview Drive is a beautiful drive or strenuous bike ride – particularly in the Fall. On the map, it is called Lakeview Drive, but to the citizens of Swain County it is “The Road to Nowhere - A Broken Promise.” But should that happen, there is always The Road to Nowhere, a scenic mountain highway that takes you six miles into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and ends at the mouth of a tunnel. Top Stops along the Road to Nowhereįor more insight into each stop along the route, our content is arranged by state.With so much to see and do in the Bryson City area, it is hard to imagine a day when you might have nowhere to go. Here along the backbone of the nation, conversations over a daybreak breakfast, afternoons spent cooling off by municipal swimming pools, and twilight American Legion baseball games provide the stuff of truly memorable Road Trip diversions, and for that reason alone, US-83 remains a must-do long-distance byway. Perhaps best of all, US-83 manages to transnavigate this broad, odd nation, albeit north-to-south, without once grazing a conventional tourist attraction. For endless miles in every direction, telephone and power poles provide some of the few signs of life between the highway and the distant horizon, though the towns-where average speeds drop suddenly from 70 mph to radar-enforced 25 mph or slower- are spaced just often enough along the highway to serve your food-and-fuel needs. Physiography aside, this route’s cultural landscape centers on small but self-sufficient farm or cattle communities that date back to the last days of the Wild West and that are far enough off the tourist trail to retain an unselfconscious, aw-shucks quaintness. Yet on US-83 you’ll also take in some phenomenal country: verdant farmland dotted with truly small towns, endlessly shifting prairie grassland, winding Missouri River roadways, and plain, isolated, where-the-hell-am-I agricultural expanses.įollowing roughly along the 100th meridian, US-83 marks the historic divide between the “civilized” eastern United States and the arid western deserts. ![]() Its grim moniker, “The Road to Nowhere,” is alternately unfair and then not severe enough, for the route navigates some of the widest and most aesthetically challenged landscapes in the country-the yawn-inducing rolling grasslands of the northern Great Plains, the beefy expanses of western Nebraska and Kansas, and the mesmerizing heat of the Texas-Oklahoma Panhandle-before following the lower Rio Grande south to the Gulf of Mexico. Once the only entirely paved route from Canada to “Old Mexico” (as hard-to-find postcards along the route still say), US-83 is still likely the shortest-from Swan River, Manitoba, dead south to Brownsville, Texas, and beyond to Matamoros, Mexico, seemingly without turning once. ![]()
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