The deep history behind the Road to Nowhere inside the Great Smoky Mountains

For those of us in Southern California there’s a similar attraction in the San Gabriel Mountains called the Bridge to Nowhere [1] along the East Fork. It was originally built in 1936 (for the gold miners IIRC) and then a massive flood in 1938 wiped out all the roads leading to it along with the miner camp. Afterwards engineers figured it wasn’t worth building anything there because the floods would continue to destroy them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_to_Nowhere_(San_Gabriel...

This isn't too far from the Bad Creek Project, a 1.5MW peaker plant drilled into a mountain by Duke Power in the 90s that drains into the lake below.

It, too, has a road to nowhere. However, that road has a public access overlook, complete with a view of the lake below and an enormous Francis turbine sitting smack dab in middle of the parking lot. Is that a scale model of the one inside the mountain? An old broken one? I don't know.

Apparently they use solar power to help run the turbine in reverse during off-hours to shoot the water back up to the bad creek reservoir.

If you want to visit, here's the location.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/tvGDn6rruL5HKH5LA

You might also want to visit the Stumphouse Mountain Tunnel in SC (about 2 hours away because mountain roads are scenic but not fast). It was started being dug by hand before the Civil War as a railroad tunnel to connect Charleston SC to the Midwest but never completed.

https://visitoconeesc.com/stumphouse-park/

Clemson University used it for a while to age their blue cheese. They have more info about the history of the tunnel on their site:

https://www.clemson.edu/bluecheese/history.html

Had the road been completed, Bryson City could have also become another Gatlinburg (as the road would be an entrance to the National Park), with the tourist revenue that goes with that. When I lived in NC 25 years ago, locals were obviously miffed about that, too. Access to cemeteries never seemed to come up.

Great writeup. Along similar lines, the East fork of the San Gabriel river is a bit outside Los Angeles. It has a dead-end road with two tunnels to nowhere, abandoned in the 1960s. Below that is a massive bridge to nowhere that connected to an under-construction road that was abandoned in the 1930s, with all traces of the road largely gone; except the bridge, which is huge and is very much still there. Much more obscure is the PL&P trail, a bit above the bridge. Built and abandoned in the 1910s. All in the same canyon!

Less deep history, but a similar looking tunnel in Pennsylvania - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandoned_Pennsylvania_Turnpik... . The most interesting thing about it is probably that it was used to film The Road.

They make for nice conversions to bike paths and hiking trails at least?

Makes me think of the Joe Colla Interchange (it eventaully went somewhere):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Colla_Interchange

or maybe the alaska bridge to nowhere (that never went at all):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge