Late-night rock slide closes main road through Great Smoky Mountains National Park

UPDATE: The National Park Service announced Newfound Gap Road reopened around 3:30 p.m. Wednesday after “the removal of 50 yards of debris.” The original story is below.

A winding two-lane road that serves as the main passage through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park has been temporarily blocked by a rock slide.

It happened around 9 p.m. Tuesday, according to the National Park Service.

A photo shared by park officials shows a mix of boulders, soil and trees spilled across travel lanes under cover of darkness.

The park did not report any motorists were injured. No drivers reported seeing the slide as it occurred, the park said.

“Newfound Gap Road is closed until further notice due to a rock slide that occurred near mile-marker 13,” the park said in a news release.

“Park staff are currently working to mitigate the issue in order to open the road as quickly (and) as is safely possible.”

Newfound Gap Road runs 31 miles and “is the only fully paved road in the park and the only one that travels through the park’s center,” according to SmokyMountains.com.

“The scenic roadway travels between the Sugarlands Visitor Center near Gatlinburg, Tennessee, up and over the mountains and into Cherokee, North Carolina,” the site reports.

A roadblock is in place near the Sugarlands Visitor Center on the Tennessee side of the park, and sites such as Smokemont Campground are accessible only “from the North Carolina side,” officials said.

Park officials did not say what might have prompted the rock slide, but it comes just a week after remnants of Tropical Storm Fred dropped up to a foot of rain on parts of the mountains.

Several landslides on the nearby Blue Ridge Parkway and tourist sites in the Pisgah National Forest have been restricted due to flood debris. Sliding Rock has been closed and Looking Glass Falls is restricting visitors to the upper observation deck until a half-acre sized log jam tumbles over the falls, McClatchy News reported.

This story was originally published August 25, 2021 at 10:36 AM.