Leonard Adkins
The story below is an excerpt from our July/August 2017 issue. For the rest of this story and more like it subscribe today, log in to read our digital edition or download our FREE iOS app. Thank you!
The flat 9.6-mile rail-trail moves through contexts from urban to wooded, and is wonderfully customizable for distance and experience.
I wrote in a recent issue about how we are living in a golden age of long-distance trail building here in the Blue Ridge region. The same could be said of the dozens of rail-trails that have been constructed in the last several decades, and the Tweetsie Trail is one of the newest.
Built upon the bed of the former East Tennessee and Western North Carolina Railroad, the 9.6-mile trail connects Johnson City with Elizabethton, Tennessee. The railroad’s engines had an unusually high-pitched sound, leading people to affectionately refer to the line as the “Tweetsie.” (You can still hear this sound when the Tweetsie Railroad operates near Boone, North Carolina during the warmer months of the year.)
The trail was just completed in late 2015 and has well exceeded usage expectations. My first visit was mid-morning during a weekday, yet scores of bicyclists, joggers, walkers and families with small children and strollers were already on the route.
Like many rail-trails, the Tweetsie’s nearly flat terrain makes for easy walking, but there are other reasons to take this route at a leisurely pace. First there is the varied scenery, continuously changing from urban backdrops to rural farmlands to shaded woodlands. There are tobacco fields, picturesque barns, rolling hills and livestock grazing in open meadows.