A schedule for repairing the Blue Ridge Parkway was announced at a recent meeting of the Governor's Advisory Committee on WNC Recovery.
Under the plan presented, the section of the Parkway that runs north of Little Switzerland to Grandfather Mountain should be finished this summer. However, the section south of Little Switzerland to Mount Mitchell will not be finished until December.
The committee met recently in Marion to discuss the ongoing effort to rebuild Western North Carolina following the September 2024 devastation of Hurricane Helene (downgraded to a tropical storm after slowing down over land).
The chairman of the committee is State Sen.Kevin Corbin, who represents Macon County.
"While the sections of the Parkway are still closed, at the same time, we're encouraged that the Park Service has accelerated the re-opening of the Parkway," Gov. Josh Stein said to the committee.
Stein joined the committee remotely via video conference in order to give the opening remarks.
National Park Service spokeswoman Leesa Brandon led the presentation on the plans for repairing the parkway. "There's lots of good news to hear about, and I hope that you'll find it as good news," Brandon said.
Brandon described the upcoming months between Memorial Day and the fall color season in October as the Parkway's "26th visitor season." She also noted that the 469-mile scenic highway runs through two states and 29 counties, saying that the Parkway has "symbiotic relationship" with these communities.
"Many of you may have already heard that we had 58 catastrophic landslides," Brandon said. "Those are not just mud sloughing down on the road — those are like total road losses."
Many of the worst landslides happened in the stretch of road between Little Switzerland and Mount Mitchell.
"There's lots of good work that went on in the first year," Brandon said.
"We completed 13 of those initial road projects, and by the time we hit the fall visitation season in October, we had 400-plus of the 469 miles of the Parkway open."
Now even more of the Parkway is open, but the small section that is closed significantly limits access to Mitchell County.
"There's a small section of the Parkway that's still closed as a result of Helene road damage ...about 45 slides and about a 40-mile section. Those are the last pieces of road recovery that we're working on now," Brandon said.
Brandon said the rebuilding process has been intense, involving a lot of rebuilding the road bed underneath the road and re-stabilizing unstable land.
"The good news is all of those (construction) projects are awarded, all of those projects are in construction as we speak, and all of those projects are set to be complete construction," Brandon said. "Our target completion is the end of calendar year 2026."
Parkway Superintendent Tracy Swartout was enthusiastic about the new repair schedule.
"It's the best news ever, that the roadway is going to be back open by the end of this calendar year,"
Swartout said. "And we're going to go further. We've got a lot more coming."