News

Ask Matt ... about road repairs in Hickory Nut Gorge

By Matt Matteson, Published: September 8, 2025

Q. When will they reopen U.S. 64 from Edneyville to Bat Cave and Chimney Rock?

   Maybe two years from now some roads will be open to the public but now, almost a year since Hurricane Helene, the Bat Cave and Gerton areas remain accessible only to workers and residents. I joined a group of invited media last month for a firsthand look at the work that NCDOT and its contractors have been doing and it was good to see how much progress had been made. Roads and mud slides have been cleared, washouts are being repaired, rock is being hauled in and a few road sections have been paved but still lack guardrails.

“We are looking forward to the fall when weather conditions are more favorable,” NCDOT resident engineer Mike Patton said. “We’re going to get it done, but you can’t build a road overnight.”

Patton said there are some 100 road construction workers in the area who are finishing the temporary roads, most of which are hardly wide enough for a dump truck or a trailer hauling a bulldozer. When complete, each road will be a standard 24-foot wide (two-lane) roadway with two-foot shoulders. “More workers will be coming when contracts are awarded for the permanent road repairs,” said Patton.

   Along Chimney Rock Road there are numerous sites where the bank of the river was completely washed away leaving a sheer vertical cliff.  Here the repair work calls for a construction technique called “grouted rock embankment” where cantaloupe-sized rocks are hauled in and concrete is poured over the rock to protect the bank from further erosion.

    One of our stops on the tour was along Hickory Creek where repairs were being made to U.S. 74A, the road to Gerton. I asked our NCDOT engineers why they didn’t move the road further away from the creek understanding it would require blasting and buying right-of-way but would not require hauling in as much rock. The answer was surprising: It’s about the money. Unless the road is rebuilt exactly where it was before the damage, there will be no federal reimbursement. 

From my observation, NCDOT and its contractors are doing a great job. We passed a large excavator turned upside down that rolled off an embankment. No one was seriously hurt but it was a sobering reminder of the dangers of repairing mountain roads.