Thirty years of argument went into building this road, and you can feel the patience in it. The Cherohala Skyway climbs through the Cherokee and Nantahala National Forests between Tellico Plains in Tennessee and Robbinsville in North Carolina, forty-odd miles of smooth, wide, well-cambered tarmac that opened in 1996. The name stitches together Cherokee and Nantahala, and the road earns both halves: it crosses real wilderness, with ridgelines rolling away in every direction and no billboard, hamlet or traffic light for as far as the eye can see.
This is the calm cousin of the nearby US 129 Deals Gap, and plenty of riders prefer it. The bends are long, the sightlines are generous, and the surface is the kind that makes you want to lean into it. Gradients are steady rather than savage, with the road topping out well above five thousand feet, high enough that the air is cool in July and that frost can come early and late. Fog sits in the hollows on cold mornings, and in winter ice can close parts of the road, so check before you go in the colder months. Police patrol it regularly, and the limit is worth respecting. Traffic is light, apart from the October weekends when the whole range turns red and gold and every car in Tennessee seems to be pulling into the overlooks.
What strikes you is how big and empty it is. Under the road lie some of the oldest mountains on earth, worn down over hundreds of millions of years into long, rounded ridges. The forests hold oak, hickory, tulip poplar and hemlock in the lower stretches and spruce-fir and grassy balds higher up, and black bears are common. Not far away stands Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, one of the few places in the East where huge old trees were never cut, and its trunks are worth a short detour on foot.
The Cherokee were here long before any highway, and the names on the map, Tellico, Santeetlah, Nantahala, are theirs. The lake you glimpse from the western side, Santeetlah, was made by a power dam in the 1920s.
Please do not rely on finding fuel on the mountain, because there is none for the full length of the climb. Robbinsville is the nearest town on this side and Andes and Murphy lie further south, so fill the tank before you commit, and carry water and a rain layer. The weather at the top is its own business.