By Jesse Wood
Sept. 10, 2012. The iconic section of “America’s Most Scenic Road” – the Linn Cove Viaduct – turns 25 years old tomorrow, Tuesday, Sept. 11, and numerous events take place celebrating the 1,243-foot viaduct and its breathtaking views.
Randy Johnson, local author and outdoor enthusiast, wrote a 10-page feature about the history of the viaduct in the August/September issue of High Country Magazine.
Photographs from the late, great Hugh Morton show the construction process, such as the lifting of one of the 153 50-ton segments of the viaduct. See the article and some of the photos below- after the listing of events celebrating the 25th anniversary.
Events
11 a.m. to 3 p.m. – Located at milepost 304, the Linn Cove Viaduct Visitor Center hosts a special anniversary celebration on Tuesday, Sept. 11, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Rangers will feature guided hikes under the Viaduct and historic pictures will be on display. We also hope to hear stories from people who worked on this project. This event is free and open to the public.
11:00 a.m. – Linn Cove Viaduct Visitor Center Open House and 25th anniversary celebration, historic photos will be on display and
those who have a personal connection to the building of the Viaduct or simply enjoy the beauty of the area are invited to stop by the Visitor Center throughout the day. Milepost 304, Blue Ridge Parkway.
12:00 p.m. – “Steel and Stone: The Nature Preserved by the Linn Cove Viaduct” one-hour, strenuous hike through the nature saved by
the viaduct, led by Blue Ridge Parkway interpretive ranger. Bring water and good hiking shoes. Hike departs from Linn Cove Viaduct Visitor Center, Milepost304.
1:00 p.m. – “A Mountain Majesty: At Last, the Missing Link is Complete” thirty-minute, easy hike under a portion of the Linn Cove
Viaduct, led by Blue Ridge Parkway interpretive ranger. Hike departs from Linn Cove Viaduct Visitor Center, Milepost
304.
2:00 p.m. – “60 Years of the Swinging Bridge” forty-five minute, guided program led by Grandfather Mountain Stewardship Foundation Director of Education and Natural Resources Jesse Pope focusing on the Bridge’s history, famous visitors and much more. Top Shop/Swinging Bridge parking lot at Grandfather Mountain. “Steel and Stone: The Nature Preserved by the Linn Cove Viaduct” hike repeated.
3:00 p.m. – “A Mountain Majesty: At Last, the Missing Link is Complete”
hike repeated.
3:30 p.m. – Swinging Bridge & Viaduct Anniversary Commemoration with Grandfather Mountain Stewardship Foundation Vice President Harris Prevost and Blue Ridge Parkway Superintendent Phil Francis. Event features local musicians. Top Shop/Swinging Bridge parking lot at Grandfather Mountain.
4:15 p.m. – “60 Years of the Swinging Bridge” forty-five minute, guided program led by Grandfather Mountain Stewardship
Foundation Director of Education and Natural Resources Jesse Pope focusing on the Bridge’s history, famous visitors and much
more. Top Shop/Swinging Bridge parking lot at Grandfather Mountain.
Shuttles will run from 1:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. from the Black Rock Parking Area to the Top Shop/Swinging Bridge Parking lot at Grandfather Mountain.
Linn Cove Viaduct Turns 25
By Randy Johnson
After decades of controversy over the long-waited, much delayed completion of the Grandfather Mountain part of the Blue Ridge Parkway—it’s not surprising that it comes as a surprise to many that it was 25 years ago when public vehicles first soared over the breathtaking Linn Cove Viaduct.
The viaduct was completed by 1984, and thousands walked, biked, and cross country skied over it before the public ever motored across in 1987—but it was a landmark event when the ribbon was cut and the experience was available from behind the wheel.
The Parkway was done! But one of the most iconic parts of “America’s Most Scenic Road” was just getting its start.
What was also just getting started was the legendary status of this bridge as a victory for the environment, a success story of sensitivity to nature. A naysayer or two has called that into question. But it doesn’t take much discussion with the landscape architects who worked their magic on Grandfather Mountain to realize that the viaduct was much more than a bridge. It was the dawning of an era when “reducing environmental impact” really took hold.
Just the Facts
The basics of that claim are simple. It starts with the Parkway’s current location being a long-wrangled over compromise with Grandfather Mountain owner Hugh Morton who rejected the National Park Service’s proposal for a “high route.” Morton said slicing a road higher across the peaks, and burrowing a tunnel through Pilot Ridge, would be “like taking a switchblade to the Mona Lisa.”
Morton prevailed and a “middle route” was chosen. But that location still retained a tricky passage of Linn Cove, a monumental, moss- and rhododendron-covered jumble of cliffs and boulders. That spot challenged road builders in the 1970s. Imagine if North Carolina had condemned the route when the location controversy first erupted and the road had been built twenty years earlier with more primitive technology.
The solution was the viaduct—a radical span built from the top down, from the starting point outward, over thin air, with sections glued together then torsioned tight with cables to form an undulating serpentine causeway just feet from trees, rocks, and thousands of feet of thin air.
Nobody better understood the challenge, or worked harder for a successful solution, than the landscape architects of the Blue Ridge Parkway.
In the Footsteps of Giants
From the start, landscape architects have shaped this road. The first and most formative of those was a true giant in the field, Parkway designer and first superintendent Stanley Abbott. He thought the parkway should “lie easily on the ground, blend harmoniously with the topography, and appear as if it had grown out of the soil.”
If the Parkway isn’t enough of a monument to him, there’s a plaque to Abbott at the Peaks of Otter in Virginia where the lake is named for him. When the road went through, that lake was no doubt a fragile mountain bog—that today would still be a bog.
Times have changed, and so has the meaning of “light on the land.” Greater sensitivity reigns now, thanks to the landscape architects and planners who followed, among them the Parkway’s viaduct-era planners Robert Allen “Bob” Hope, Gary Johnson, and Robert Schreffler.
Gary Johnson, who started the viaduct project after joining the Parkway fresh out of college, attributes the idea of a “top down, segmental span” to the Federal Highway Administration engineers working with the Parkway planners.
In an oral history recorded years ago, Bob Hope, the Parkway’s resident landscape architect during that time, under legendary Parkway Superintendent Gary Everhardt, described how the plan for the viaduct came about.
“We knew the rugged terrain at Linn Cove,” said Hope. “We had no idea how to get through there with a road. … Finally after about three or four hikes around there with (what seemed like) everybody in the National Park Service,” he said, laughing, “we finally reached a location and agreed that the only way to get through here was just to bridge all these rock formations and not disturb the rocks.”
The Federal Highway Administration engineers said they’d have to get an outside consulting firm and Hope said, they just wanted to know: “Can it be done? Can you cantilever on a curvature like that without it tipping over?” And Figg & Muller, the eventual contractor, said, “‘Yeah, it could be done.”
A Problem Waiting Decades for a Solution
All along, the Parkway’s route had Linn Cove in the way. Years of building had completed the road to the north and south, but after wrangling with Hugh Morton for a few decades, Bob Hope remembered, “We kind of designed and built (ourselves) into a problem with our back against the wall. We had to do something to get on through.”
Hope remembers one bridge engineer on the project who made a lot of difference.
“Rex Cocroft,” said Hope. “He’s probably the one who sold federal highway on that design scheme. The precast segments placed in progressive placement.”
Hope remembered, “There’s a story about Rex and some of the engineers from Federal Highway. We would meet at Grandfather Mountain and talk and look at preliminary plans. I don’t know how long this process had gone on. But the outcome usually was, why, they would go back to Arlington and study it some more.”
“Finally,” Hope said, “we met down there and they decided they’d go back and study it some more. So the landscape architects went home and Federal Highway stayed on another night. They decided they would stay there until they worked it out.”
“That night,” says Hope, “they were sitting around talking. Rex had a topo map of the area and he started circling in red the points where there were suitable footings. So he’d circle this one in red … another over here in red. Finally they decided, ‘Well, that was the design.’ They just connected the red dots … and there’s your bridge.”
Imagine, this was just a few years after the National Environmental Protection Act—called a modern “Environmental Magna Carta.” By the standards of the day, the Parkway already had a “light on the land” philosophy. With the Linn Cove Viaduct, the Parkway was leading the way into a new era of environmental protection.
This would not be a road gouged through a piece “land.” It would float over a sensitive environment—elevated above single spots that were suitable for construction of supports.
Gary Johnson Among His Mentors
Johnson was among a group of National Park Service and Federal Highway Administration technical staff overseeing the planning and construction of the “Missing Link.” Other names he remembers from that group include regional geotechnical engineer Gary Klinedienst and Roy Crawford.
Johnson got where he was in part thanks to the Vietnam War. He was heading into regional planning until a stint in the U.S. Air Force redirected him to landscape architecture. After earning his degree at Virginia Tech, he found himself at the National Park Service’s Denver Service Center in the 1970s. He was transferred to the Blue Ridge Parkway from 1976 to 1979, and after working on the Folk Art Center, he became the National Park Service’s primary project inspector working with Federal Highway Administration engineers on Grandfather Mountain. He prepared construction drawings for the Linn Cove Viaduct abutment treatments, site plans, and several overlooks.
Johnson was one of five people working on the bridge pictured standing on the route of the future viaduct in a 1979 Denver Service Center newsletter article. The caption said he was “in an area undisturbed by roads or even trails”—much as Stanley Abbott had been in the 1930s all along the route of the Parkway. One participant was asked what he thought of the bushwhack hike. “That was two hikes for me,” he said, “my first and my last through that part of the country.”
Johnson remembers leading a tour of the viaduct site for one of the firms intending to bid on the design of the project.
It was during the bitter winter of 1977 and “they needed to walk the site of the seven viaduct support piers. It was just bloody cold,” he says. “We drove near the site, but there had been a major snow and ice storm. We almost froze to death. I had to dig down through the snow just to find the stakes for the piers.”
As the viaduct plan was completed by Figg & Muller Engineering and construction started, Johnson became “the enforcer” for efforts to make the new road “lay lightly on the land.”
Flagging a Route to the Future
It was Johnson’s job to hand pick and flag the trees that were permitted to be cut for construction. After construction started, he was monitoring compliance with the rules when he came back to find a mass of dirt and rocks piled against a major old tree. “I really let’em have it,” he says. “I told them to build tree wells in those situations and to really walk a lot more softly.”
About a week later Johnson was called back. The contractor refused to cut an unflagged tree and Johnson had to OK it. “I went out there and this tree was 6-feet tall and one-inch in diameter,” he says with a laugh. “The thought crossed my mind that these guys were messing with me, but they’d gotten the message. I needed to make these kind of decisions and we wanted the contractor to know we were serious.”
“Our goal for this bridge,” Johnson says, “was to have it look like it had been there for a century—to look like it had almost grown out of the mountain.”
The stunning fact is that today’s thorough environmental impact statements were in their infancy. Hope and Johnson had written the EIS for the viaduct—30 pages. “It would be a book today,” he says.
That might get people nodding who dislike government regulation—but why wouldn’t this site, on this mountain, warrant a truly thorough environmental assessment? “Today we’d have botanists and biologists all over out there,” Johnson says. “Truth be told, many of the species on that mountainside weren’t even inventoried. Nevertheless, the National Environmental Protection Act had set some standards. Environmental sensitivity was at the front of our minds.”
Johnson remembers other examples of concern for the environment. When the sites for the viaduct supports needed to be checked, core sampling drills were helicoptered onto the spot where they were needed.
The expense of the “Missing Link” also escalated as new bridges were needed to lessen impact. As the road was planned lower on the mountain, more and bigger drainages had to be crossed and more pronounced ridges required more elaborate curves and turns—the single reason why the 45 mph speed limit of the Parkway had to drop to 35 mph around Grandfather Mountain.
That meant more bridges, but even more were added when sensitive areas had to be crossed. Johnson remembers an “unmerciful” lobbying session with a Federal Highway engineer who was adamant that his “boss said no more bridges—and now you want two more bridges! He’s going to be mad as hell!”
Johnson and the Parkway got their way. Many places on that section were just not “suitable to conventional cut and fill or culvert.” So Johnson was able to put a very low bridge above a boulder field with a complex natural drainage system.
Another victory of technology over destruction came at “The Great Wall of China,” that massive retaining wall just across the Parkway from the Rough Ridge Parking Area. “That was all new technology that held the road away from the mountain, reducing the road cut above and containing the fill below.”
Timing is Everything
“You know,” Johnson continues, “it’s likely that the years of controversy with Hugh Morton permitted the right solution to emerge. I personally believe that the viaduct was the perfect solution for that landscape. If the road had been built when originally planned, it wouldn’t be what it is today.”
Johnson came back to the Blue Ridge Parkway from 1994 to his retirement in 2011. During those years, Johnson “literally wrote the book” about preservation of the Parkway’s scenic views. His Guidebook for the Blue Ridge Parkway Scenery Conservation System is the Parkway’s handbook for protecting scenic vistas.
Johnson received the Appleman-Judd-Lewis Award for excellence in cultural resource management on March 17, 2011 from National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis. Presenting the award, Jarvis said, “Preservation is about deciding what’s important, figuring out how to protect it, and passing along an appreciation to others. Recipients of this award have excelled in all of these aspects.”
Looking back, Johnson says, “we never realized how iconic this part of the Parkway would become, but it’s hard not to be proud to have helped design and build it. I’m convinced this part of the Parkway can trace its heritage all the way back to Stanley Abbott.”
This End Was a Beginning
Of course, the road opened to wide acclaim on September 11th, 1987. By the time it did, hikers were wandering the mountain side on the Tanawha Trail, seeing even more spectacular sights than the vistas visible from the viaduct.
The Tanawha Trail almost didn’t happen. Bob Hope remembers, “When the parkway was being funded, we knew we wanted a foot trail to connect the overlooks, but there was no project money for the trail. So the superintendent (Gary Everhardt), decided to take it on as a project. He convinced the Federal Highway that the foot trail was an integral part of the parkway. And so it was funded.”
Today, the Tanawha Trail explores the sunny side of Grandfather now known for world-class biodiversity befitting what the mountain later became—an International Biosphere Reserve. On the trail’s climb from Linn Cove, it gently crosses a spectacular boulder garden of rare plants, one of the mountain’s many distinct ecosystems, much like the area successfully spanned by the low bridge Johnson prescribed over the boulder field.
Ironically, this pristine, preserved ecosystem on the Tanawha Trail is where the Parkway would be today if the proposed “high route” had been built. This endangered area might have been eradicated had construction not taken a long pause until the computer age ushered in the technology needed to design the viaduct.
Johnson says, “I was there when the arguments and negotiations with Hugh Morton were fresh in people’s mind. For years the National Park Service had been hoping the state would just buy Grandfather Mountain,” Johnson says. “Sometimes things just happen when they’re ready. This part of the Parkway almost seems predestined to have turned out for the best.”
This fall when you drive the Parkway, pause near the Virginia line at Cumberland Knob, where the Parkway started 77 years ago. There’s a monument there to notice. It honors the Parkway’s landscape architects—the folks whose toil and troubles have perfected the promise of this iconic park in our back yard.
Writer Randy Johnson trudged the Parkway route with Bob Hope and Hugh Morton as the mountain’s trail manager. He’s writing a new book for the University of North Carolina Press—Grandfather Mountain: A Guide and History to An Appalachian Icon. His books are the preferred trail guides for hiking in the High Country. Visit www.RandyJohnsonBooks.com
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