The town sits on the Tellico River at the foot of the mountains in Monroe County, Tennessee, a quiet place of a few hundred people with a general store atmosphere, a small main street and one or two stations. The sensible habit is to fill the tank here, buy something to eat, and only then turn onto Tennessee 165, the road that becomes the Cherohala Skyway as it climbs.
The skyway itself is a curious piece of American public works. Planned in the early 1960s to link Tellico Plains with Robbinsville, North Carolina, across the Unicoi Mountains, it took decades to finish because the ridge is steep and the engineers had to blast and bridge their way over and around it. It opened in 1996. The name stitches together Cherokee and Nantahala, the two national forests it crosses, and the project cost a fortune for a road with no real commercial reason to exist. That is exactly what makes it a joy: it was built for the view and the drive.
The Tellico valley below is Cherokee country. Tellico was an important Cherokee town before European settlers arrived, and the nearby Overhill towns were the centre of the Cherokee world in the eighteenth century. The Tellico River itself is a famous trout stream, cold and clear and tumbling over boulders, and the forest above it is dense hardwood, which turns spectacular in October.
For the rider, the first miles out of town are a gentle warm-up. The road follows the river through shaded woods, with easy bends and a good surface, and the rhythm gradually tightens as the grade increases. It is a road for smooth riding rather than heroics, with long, well-engineered curves and few blind corners, but the traffic can include logging trucks, drivers who stop suddenly for photographs and wandering deer at dusk.
Tellico Plains is small, so Athens, about twenty-eight kilometres to the west, is the nearest sizeable town if you need anything more. The skyway is usually open year-round, but high sections can ice over in winter, so check conditions if you are riding between November and March. Spring comes late to the top, where redbud and dogwood are still in flower weeks after the valley has gone to leaf.