The Linn Cove Viaduct: The Missing Link of the Blue Ridge Parkway

You are near the Linn Cove Viaduct, the graceful curving bridge that hugs the slopes of Grandfather Mountain and completes the Blue Ridge Parkway. The parkway broke ground back on September eleventh, nineteen thirty-five, near Cumberland Knob, but this final stretch had to wait for decades. The delay was not about money alone.

Grandfather Mountain holds a fragile, ancient ecosystem, and engineers, environmentalists, and landowners spent roughly twenty years searching for a design that would carry the road without scarring the mountain. Their answer was to build the road on stilts in the air. Designed by the firm Figg and Muller, the viaduct is a concrete segmental bridge one thousand two hundred forty-three feet long, assembled from one hundred fifty-three individual sections.

Crews built it from the top down to keep heavy equipment off the delicate ground below, even lowering some drilling gear to its work sites by helicopter. Construction of the viaduct began in nineteen seventy-nine and finished in nineteen eighty-three at a cost near ten million dollars. When the full parkway finally opened to through traffic in nineteen eighty-seven, it had been fifty-two years in the making, and the Linn Cove Viaduct was the last piece to fall into place.

Driving it feels like floating around the mountainside.