Mitchell County officials are concerned that the National Park Service has yet to schedule Blue Ridge Parkway repairs in the areas closest to the county.
“The work that is currently going on is from Blowing Rock to the Linville exit where you come off of Grandfather Mountain,” Board Chair Jeff Harding said at a May meeting of the Mitchell County Board of Commissioners.
Harding and representatives of other Western North Carolina counties met with Park Service officials in Boone to find out what the plans are for repairing the damage to the road from Hurricane Helene (downgraded to a tropical storm after slowing down over land).
“I asked a specific question if that would include on to the (Mitchell County) Visitor Center, the Little Switzerland area,” Harding said. “That has not been bid yet. It will be coming up to bids this summer — earliest projection date if everything went according to plan will be next summer, early fall (2026).”
The Blue Ridge Parkway suffered extensive damage when Helene came to Western North Carolina and surrounding states last September.
According to the National Park Service, “the work to restore the Parkway is complex and some areas will take years to repair and fully reopen.”
The park service has been able to reopen 310 miles of the 469-mile road in
Virginia and North Carolina. All of the Virginia section of the road is currently open, but damage in North Carolina was particularly severe.
There is a significant washout near Wildacres Retreat in Little Switzerland where a section of pavement multiple car lengths long has vanished down the mountainside, with the end of the landslide disappearing into the trees hundreds of feet below.
Harding said that he had asked the park service to consider recommending that Parkway travelers go through Mitchell County when it’s putting up detour signs at the closed sections.
“That is really not an option right now,” Harding said.
According to the park service, there is a 200-mile stretch of the Parkway in North Carolina that has significant landslides, from the Carolina-Virginia state line to the area just beyond Mount Pisgah, south of Asheville.
However, most of Parkway damage is in the Avery-Mitchell-Yancey area, with the highest concentration of the landslides having occurred between Linville Falls and Mount Mitchell.