It’s All Uphill for Tennessee Parkway Construction Project

Bridge-builder Randy Everett looks across the lush greenery of Caylor Gap to a clearing a mile and a half away. It seems so close, but he could spend a career getting there.

“If we end up doing all 10 bridges, we are talking several years,” he says. “So, yeah, I could potentially retire on it.”

Everett, 35, is the most recent Federal Highway Administration project engineer assigned to the Foothills Parkway--72 miles of ridgetops overlooking Tennessee’s side of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

“It is no joke,” says Smokies park spokesman Bob Miller. “A lot of guys have retired on this job.”

Conceived in the 1920s, authorized by Congress in 1944 and finally begun in 1960, these winding two lanes are the state’s oldest unfinished public works project.

Everett’s job is to erect the first two of 10 bridges that will span rugged Caylor Gap. This is the missing link between two parkway sections almost finished 15 years ago when the Park Service stopped work because of environmental and construction problems.

Only two sections--22.5 miles--are done, and they are at either end of the project, which begins at Interstate 40 near the North Carolina line in the east and ends at Chilhowee Lake in the west. Completing the link, which is expected to take at least 15 years, will add 16 miles to the western end. But it will still leave more than half the parkway to go.

Randy Pope, who renewed interest in the project as Smokies superintendent in the 1980s, believes the project’s original mission is still valid--to provide inspiring panoramic views of the Smokies while diverting some traffic from the most-visited park in the United States.

Former Tennessee Highway Commissioner David Pack foresaw millions of tourists, wanting “a rest from the superhighways,” turning off onto the Foothills Parkway to view the Smokies at their leisure.

He made that observation in 1966, when the first section of the roadway opened. Last year, more than 10 million people came to the park in 4.3 million cars and campers--1 million more vehicles than a decade ago.

Frank Maloney, a Knoxville highway contractor and conservationist, is credited with dreaming up the parkway after Congress decided to let the Blue Ridge Parkway run from Virginia to North Carolina instead of Tennessee.

Getting support for the Foothills Parkway concept was easy. Getting money has always been more difficult.

Congress agreed to build the parkway, but Tennessee had to buy the corridor and turn it over to the Park Service. A decade passed before Gov. Frank Clement approved the plan in 1956. The last parcel was acquired in 1979.

Never a high priority with Congress, the Foothills Parkway suffered while dollars flowed to the much longer Blue Ridge and Natchez Trace parkways. The Natchez Trace runs from Nashville to Natchez, Miss.

In the 1970s, Foothills Parkway appropriations were frozen because of the Vietnam War. “It’s too bad because it could have been done years ago with minimum costs,” Pope says.

The original price for the whole project: $15 million. Just two bridges now: $12.8 million. All 10 bridges now? Perhaps $60 million. And the rest of the route? Maybe $273 million.

That means critics.

“If that doesn’t tell you the absurdity of it, then what does?” says Geoff Riggin of Greenback, Tenn. The veterinarian led an effort in 1997 to keep the 16 miles of unfinished road on either side of the missing link open exclusively to hikers, cyclists and horseback riders.

The project stopped in the 1980s when the Tennessee Department of Transportation encountered tough terrain, rockslides, hillside erosion and acid runoff that polluted three streams, prompting one state agency to sue another.

The Federal Highway Administration returned to the project last year with funding secured by Rep. John J. Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.) and orders from the Park Service to tread more lightly on the land. “We want not only a nice view from the road but of the road,” Miller says.

Randy Brown, director of the Foothills Land Conservancy, which buys land for habitat preservation near the park, said the parkway already has proved valuable by removing highly visible ridgetop property from potential development.

The conservancy also has received several donations from people with now-inaccessible land that borders the parkway right of way, he said.

Meanwhile, Everett and a crew of 40 workers tackle Caylor Gap’s two spans. The structures are 100 feet off the ground and built with prestressed concrete designed to last 100 years.

Everett believes the parkway’s new bridges will eventually be completed, adding, “It would be discouraging if I don’t see people driving on them.”

Dean Stone, a founding member and former president of the Foothills Parkway Assn., is hopeful too.

“I don’t think there is any question that they will finish the missing link because that will open up a road that is already built,” Stone says.

But beyond that, he says, “It’s just like throwing darts.”

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On the Net:

Great Smoky Mountains National Park:

https://www.nps.gov/grsm/foothill.htm