Waterfalls and hiking are two popular pastimes along the Blue Ridge Parkway and the roughly two and a quarter mile trek to the 70' Crabtree Falls within the Crabtree Meadows Recreation Area is one of the more popular ones. The hike is slightly strenuous - it's downhill to get there which means it's all uphill to get back - but the view, like my photo above, is worth it.
The Asheville Citizen-Times continues to do a great job covering all the angles of the Interstate 40 Haywood County rock slide. An article in Sunday's edition provides a strong historical perspective on how the Pigeon River routing of Interstate 40 came about. And perhaps most strikingly, in an article that ran just prior to the highway's opening in the fall of 1968, how engineers from both Tennessee and North Carolina warned "...that slides would probably be a major problem along the route for many years." On February 12, 1969, not long after the Interstate opened, the first rock slide that would close I-40 occurred. Like many other Interstates within North Carolina, Interstate 40 through the mountains has a history prior to formation of the Interstate Highway System and was also a heated political battle between local communities. The discussion for a road that would eventually become Interstate 40 dates back to the 1940's as the idea for interregional high
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