Blue Ridge Parkway

North Carolina, United States

The federal government condemned over 5,000 individual properties to build what would become America's most visited National Park Service unit, displacing mountain families who had farmed the same ridges for five generations. Between 1933 and 1987, engineers carved 469 miles of roadway along the crest of the [[rabbit:Blue Ridge Mountains]], following ridgelines that had served as hunting paths and trading routes for the [[rabbit:Cherokee Nation]] centuries before European contact.

The Cherokee called these mountains Shaconage, meaning "land of the blue smoke," referring to the natural haze that rises from the dense forests covering slopes that climb from 650 feet in valley bottoms to over 6,600 feet at [[rabbit:Mount Mitchell]]. The ridgeline highway connects two existing national parks, Shenandoah in Virginia and Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina and Tennessee, threading through the oldest mountains in North America. These peaks formed 480 million years ago during the [[rabbit:Taconic Orogeny]], when colliding tectonic plates thrust ancient seafloor sediments skyward. The resulting topography created a natural highway along the ridge crests, where travelers could avoid the steep ravines and dense rhododendron thickets that choked the lower valleys.

The parkway enters North Carolina at [[rabbit:Cumberland Knob]], milepost 218, and winds 252 miles south through the western counties before ending at the entrance to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Along this route, the road maintains an average elevation of 3,000 feet, dipping to 1,200 feet at the French Broad River near Asheville and climbing to 6,047 feet at [[rabbit:Richland Balsam]]. The design speeds