Day 6 - Day of the Dragon

Wow! What a day! We started out from our hotel location in Hillsville, VA, which was just up the road from our finish of the Blue Ridge Parkway yesterday at Fancy Gap. It was quite overcast, with some heavy fog that was hanging in the air but not at the ground level. The temperature was a coolish 52 degrees, but I was smart enough to start out with my heated liner in and I did use it!

We took off north on I-77, to then 77 joins I81 for a bit, but then, instead of staying on I-77 North, we took a little excursion near Wytheville onto a really sweet road - Stoney Fork Rd. Its shown in the green on the map shot below, paralleling I-77 'till we came back on ar Rte 42. We did get robbed of just a little bit of the road when upon the decent of the mountain we came over, we came up behind two semi trucks - the first a STUDENT driver, who was negotiating the curves at an excruciatingly slow pace, followed up by an empty logging truck. Just as we got down to the bottom of the mountain, we managed to find a safe passing opportunity and took it. Then it was back on I-77 for a bit more before yet another sweet road - Grapefield Rd (Rte 614) which took us westward and onto Clearfield Rd (Rte 61) which then took us into Tazewell where we would pick up our next target road - VA 16 - the "Back of the Dragon".

Early part of the day's route

The Back of the dragon didn't start out so well for me. It was VERY twisty, and included a lot of elevation change which would make it well worthy of the "Top 15 MC Roads" but the early 1/3 rd section had heavy deposits of pea size gravel in almost every single turn. After having my front wash out slightly on three turns in a row, I was seriously concerned about a get off and had to roll back on the throttle so as to be sure to ride another day. After a while the gravel subsided, but then we had to deal with some freshly mown shoulders where the cuttings were left laying on the roadway also presenting a hazard. Eventually we got to a cleaner section and things improved and we did get to enjoy some of the 33 miles of the Back of the Dragon.

The following group of pix are all from the Back of the Dragon (VA 16), taken from my helmet mounted GoPro Hero Camera.

From there it was another 110 miles of I-81 south until we got off at US 25E which we took down to US 411 to take us into Sevierville. The route through Sevierville and towards Pigeon Forge was tedious. Heavy slow moving traffic with traffic lights every 3/10's of a mile. Eventually we turned off onto Wears Valley Rd (US 321) and eventually that took us onto the Foothills Parkway. (Shown in BLUE in screen capture below) From there things improved significantly, as the traffic was nil, the road surface clean and another nice twisty road to run! That took us right into US129 - AKA "The Dragon" We headed south on 129 towards Deals Gap and noted some oncoming riders signalling something - what we weren't exactly sure, but it became very apparent when a motorcycle cop lit up the car that we were following and pulled him over for speeding. Thank you Dragon gods!

Latter part of the days route

After a stop at the turnaround pullout which was LOADED with bikes when we got there we finally got underway on the Tail of the Dragon. It was pretty sweet for a while until we came up on a car driven by someone who was, lets just say less than qualified to be driving a Challenger RT on the Dragon. This guy was barely making 10 MPH around the corners and passed at least 6 turnouts without ever even trying to take one to let us by. It took a few more burned turns before we finally got an opportunity and in a flash we were by him. Not too far ahead we came up on a cruiser with a passenger and they let us by after the 2nd turn-out and then there was a pair of sport bikes on our tail, to which we immediately yielded so they could get by, but by then they, and us we all stuck behind a couple more bikes running pretty sedately and thats how we ended coming into the Resort.

Start of the Tail of the Dragon - The turnout/around at the western end

Decent run for a while but slower traffic eventually holds us up

End of the Tail of the Dragon - Deals Gap Resort at the southern end

After a gas fill for ride documentation ($3.81 a gallon!) and some photos, we set out for our reserved room in downtown Robbinsville.

Stats for the day today:

338.4 miles in 7 hours moving time, 8:58 elapsed time.

Added GPS Track for the day: