If you’re like me, you avoid driving I-40 through the Pigeon River Gorge like warm beer on a hot summer day.

Hey, if I have to circle through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas to enter Tennessee from the west and then drive east back to Knoxville, I’ll do it. Perhaps I exaggerate, but that drive through the gorge to Knoxville has always been one of white knuckles, clinched orifices and prayers that speeding semis don’t topple over on you in a curve.

It’s a terrible road — windy, steep in places and remarkably prone to rockslides and landslides, as we’ve seen over the past 10 months.

Last September, Tropical Storm Helene caused the Pigeon River to swell into a raging torrent, which undermined the interstate’s lanes and caused it to shut down for five months. The NCDOT noted that the storm “washed away about 3 million cubic yards of dirt, rock and material from the side of I-40.”

It reopened with one lane in each direction March 1, but that was short-lived. Heavy rain June 18 caused a rockslide near the North Carolina-Tennessee line, and the road was closed until June 27. 

These slides conjured memories for a regular correspondent of mine, who emailed me this: 

“I’ve always heard that I-40 through the gorge from North Carolina to Tennessee was originally planned for a different location, but that business people in Waynesville urged that it go where it is today — despite geo-engineers concluding that route was not optimal and potentially dangerous. Is that version true, or a myth that’s seeped into local lore? Please help us all with the history and backstory of the current route, one that is creating so much consternation and harm to the region. Did it have to be designed this way?”

It’s a salient point, mainly because in the 30 years I’ve been here, slides in the gorge have been about as commonplace as someone firing up a spliff on an Asheville sidewalk. 

Neither gorge nor French Broad River routes were great

Not surprisingly, much has been written about all of this, including a 2009 story I wrote for the Citizen Times in which I quoted several sources who said the Pigeon River Gorge posed known geologic problems and was prone to sliding even during construction. Jody Kuhne, a state engineering geologist with the NCDOT, provided a particularly colorful interview.

“Lots of people these days will say highway decisions are all politics — well, hell yes, they are,’” Kuehne said. “Back at that time, Haywood County had a large paper mill, major railroad access and other industry, and Madison County just didn’t have that, except some in Hot Springs. So sure, they out-politicked Madison. The road went where the action was.”

Ever since North Carolina had passed a law in 1921 stating that all counties should have a road that connects their county seat to neighboring county seats, people in Haywood had pushed for a road to the next county west, in Tennessee. Initially, the proposal was for a two-lane road, but that changed when Dwight Eisenhower became president in the 1950s and pushed for the interstate program we have today.

Haywood business leaders and politicians wanted the interstate to come their way; leaders and politicians in Buncombe and Madison counties wanted the road to follow the French Broad River where 25/70 runs today.

While many have assailed the Pigeon River Gorge as a terrible choice because of its geology, Kuehne told me in 2009 that neither route presented a good option.

“The Hot Springs-French Broad River route has crazy geologic (stuff) you can’t even wrap your mind around,” he said, explaining that it has rounded quartz rock.

It also has just as much low-to medium-grade metamorphic rock — which is more prone to slides — as the Pigeon River Gorge. In fact, 25-70 also has been prone to slides, but they don’t get noticed as much because of its lower traffic volume, Kuehne said.

I also interviewed retired NCDOT District Engineer Stan Hyatt for that story.

“I would say today, if we had no road through Haywood, with the advances in geotechnology, we would never try to build an interstate type road down there, unless there was just no place else to put it,” Hyatt said. “It’s just an area that’s full of nothing but fractured rock waiting to fall off.”

This was well known during construction and in 1968 when I-40 opened. An October 1968 Citizen-Times article quoted a Tennessee engineer who said, “It seemed like the rock and dirt had been oiled. We would blast it out, level it, ditch it, and then it would slide almost before we could get the machinery out of the way.”

The reporter noted presciently, “Engineers from both Tennessee and North Carolina said that slides would probably be a major problem along the route for many years.”

And they have been. The area has seen dozens of slides over the years, including some that shut I-40 down for months.

Was it political? Yes, no, maybe, probably…

Sussing out the politics of all this is more difficult, as they go back to the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s.

Adam Prince, who runs the blog Gribblenation, wrote a fine, well-footnoted piece about the gorge and I-40’s troubled history a month after Helene. He noted that, “I-40’s route through the Pigeon River Gorge dates to local political squabbles in the 1940s and a state highway law written in 1921.”

Prince wrote:

“A small note appeared in the July 28, 1945, Asheville Times. It read that the North Carolina State Highway Commission had authorized a feasibility study of a ‘…water-level road down [the] Pigeon River to the Tennessee line.’”

Prince found that a Pigeon River Gorge study, “along with a study on improving the existing US 25/70 corridor through Madison County via a water-level route along the French Broad River, was completed in late 1948.”

“The French Broad Route of US 25/70 through Marshall and Hot Springs had been the long-established travel route between Asheville and Eastern Tennessee,” Prince wrote. “Confusion on whether or not the two studies were related to each other was amplified when in December of that year, outgoing North Carolina Governor R. Gregg Cherry awarded $450,000 in surplus highway funding for the construction of the Pigeon River route.”

Construction did not follow, though, because as Prince pointed out, “it was also unknown how the route would be built.” Summer 1951 was a turning point, Prince states, as in that June “a public hearing in Asheville was held to discuss the two corridors. It was questioned if a survey of the French Broad River corridor had occurred, and the backers of that route requested another.”

In July, Gov. W. Kerr Scott awarded $500,000 toward the construction of the Pigeon River Route.

“The award cemented the eventuality of a Waynesville-to-Tennessee highway,” Prince writes. “Yet, French Broad River backers continued to push for an improved water-level US 25/70 route along that corridor.”

Two years later, the first construction project in the gorge was awarded, $1.3 million to grade 6.5 miles of “eventual roadway from the Tennessee line to Cold Springs Creek Road (Exit 7 on today’s I-40).”

Next came Eisenhower’s interstate system and lots of federal money — and more squabbling. Tennessee wanted the Haywood route, too. Prince writes:

“In 1954, Harry E. Buchanan, commissioner of the 14th Highway Division, met with Tennessee officials on how best to link the two states between the French Broad and Pigeon River routes. At a meeting of the Southeastern Association of Highway Officials in Nashville, Buchanan met with Tennessee officials — who wanted to shift the proposed Asheville-Knoxville Interstate Corridor to follow the Pigeon River.”

Tennessee officials urged the North Carolina Highway Commission to propose the changed corridor to the Bureau of Public Roads.

“The announcement immediately sparked the ire of Madison and Buncombe Counties and City of Asheville officials. The published 1947 map of proposed Interstate corridors had the Asheville-Knoxville link follow the existing US 25/70 French Broad River route.”

But, as Prince reported, “by April 1955, the North Carolina State Highway Commission had ‘tentatively confirmed’ the Pigeon River route for the new Interstate; backers of the French Broad Route then successfully delayed the final decision by urging the commission to undertake a complete study of the French Broad River corridor. The reprieve did not last long.” 

Asheville engineer T.M. Howerton completed a study of two possible French Broad routes, but in June 1956 the State Highway Commission voted for the Pigeon River route. Prince states:

“While Howerton’s study pointed to a lower cost for the French Broad route by 50 percent ($15 million vs. $30 million), SHC officials estimated that the financials were the reverse, with the Pigeon River route being less expensive. They also stated the French Broad Route ‘was not feasible.’ Suspicions rose throughout the state about the Highway Commission’s decision to award without a fully sanctioned study completed.”

Ultimately, the Pigeon River route cost $33 million, Prince notes. 

The road opened in October 1968. The first rockslide that would close the interstate occurred Feb. 12, 1969.

With all the maneuvering and machinations of the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, it’s no surprise the notion lingered that the route choice was all political. But I haven’t found anything suggesting anything particularly nefarious or illegal transpired, although I’d suspect some smoke-filled, back-room shenanigans came into play.

Prince told me via email that he’s “pretty much in general agreement with (me) that most of this was out in the open,” although he did note that he had received a few “very adamant” comments that Canton’s Champion paper mill exerted strong influence. 

“However, I have yet to find any information about Champion Papers publicly or privately lobbying for I-40 through the Pigeon River Gorge,” Prince said.

Mark Barrett, who worked for the Citizen Times for more than three decades, covering both the state house as well as local growth and development, also delved into the I-40 politics-at-play issue, particularly in a 1989 article.

Barrett quoted the late Zeno Ponder, a Democratic political kingpin in Madison County for decades, who said the I-40 decision revolved around political allegiances, particularly those of former Democratic Gov. Cherry.

“Madison County was really a Republican county…and all the counties from Haywood west were solidly Democrat. And Gregg Cherry had put up the money for the surveys,” Ponder said.

Barrett said he’s heard rumblings about outsized influence of a governor or two over the years, but nothing that screamed “scandal.”

“Was it a political decision? Maybe, maybe not,” Barrett told me last week. “There was a political battle over it at the time, but it’s hard to tell from this distance whether one side was more influential than the other, or if engineers just decided on technical grounds.”

When I wrote that 2009 story, I noted that “at least 10 landslides have shut down the highway since 1972.” 

Barrett wrote another story in July 1997 that listed 20 between 1969 and 1997, including one that involved a fatality in 1977. 

NCDOT’s Helene repair project page states the estimated cost of the fix to I-40 after Helene over a 12-mile stretch at the gorge at ​$1 billion.

Does the future hold more slides? 

The state has spent plenty of money over the years battling these slides. Barrett’s 1997 article mentioned that the NCDOT spent $14 million in 1982 on stabilizing slopes, erecting barriers and shifting portions of travel lanes farther from slopes on the four miles of I-40 closest to the Tennessee state line.

Periodic projects have recurred since. 

Last October, after Helene, the NCDOT issued a brief geologic synopsis of the I-40 area from the Tennessee line to mile marker 5 in North Carolina. It first notes that the I-40 corridor through the gorge “has had a troubled history.”

“The terrain and geology of the area have proved difficult barriers to developing a resilient roadway facility, causing problems that have persisted from construction to today,” the report states. “The steep, sometimes vertical, narrow valley provides little area to establish a sound embankment, and the geology underlying the slopes proves too complex to develop stable tall, rock cuts.

“Detrimental rockfall is a common occurrence in the study area and is exacerbated by the geographically and proprietarily constricted facility corridor,” it continues. It also mentions the fixes, which have included rock anchors, rock nets, expanded catchment areas, retaining walls and scaling of loose and unstable material.

Still, unstable slopes have led to large rock falls at mile markers .4, 2.5, and 4.5, “with many smaller ones occurring over the same length of highway at differing times or the same time,” according to the report.

It gets even more dire.

“Adding to the difficulty of unstable slopes is the limited area on which the supporting embankment has as a foundation,” the report states. “Embankment with steep slopes is oftentimes founded directly on bedrock which commonly has a steeply sloping surface. Channel morphology of the Pigeon River has also played a large part in the instability of certain sections of the embankment.”

In other words, it’s a river gorge with rocks that formed in an unstable way, and they’re prone to sliding.

“Erosion is accelerated in areas where the channel bends sharply against the east side of the gorge, flowing directly into the foundation of the I-40 facility,” the report states.

In that 2009 story, I mentioned that a 1997 study found 49 places along I-40 near Tennessee that were potential slide problems. Workers had installed rock bolts to stabilize the slopes, but another retired engineer said they knew at the time the bolts were not a permanent solution.

“There’s only one way to fix it so it won’t slide, and that’s to just flatten the slope out,” the engineer said. “And you might have to blast all the way to Tennessee to do that.”

In the meantime, keep an eye out when you travel through the gorge.

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Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. John Boyle has been covering Asheville and surrounding communities since the 20th century. You can reach him at (828) 337-0941, or via email at jboyle@avlwatchdog.org. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.

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