Ghost Town in the Sky, a Wild West theme park on top of a mountain in Maggie Valley, North Carolina, has had a sometimes bumpy career as a tourist attraction. Its latest trauma has been an impending foreclosure, threatened for as early as June 2010. But that awful fate is now on hold, because the lone road leading to the attraction has been blocked by a landslide. It came from Ghost Town in the Sky, but somehow didn’t damage the attraction at all!
Did Ghost Town in the Sky somehow channel its ghostly powers to send the earth hurtling downward for its own preservation? If so, it did a spectacular job. The Waynesville Smoky Mountain News reports that the slide will cost an estimated $1.5 million to clear, and that it is so precarious that any attempt to move it might trigger a second, spectacularly catastrophic avalanche that would sweep away homes and threaten lives.
Of course, no one can get up to Ghost Town in the Sky and enjoy it as an attraction while the road is blocked — a consequence that a desperate attraction with hamhanded supernatural powers might not have considered. And even if all of the mud and debris can somehow be very gingerly cleared from the road, the unstable soil above it might give way again. “I wouldn’t want a crowd up there on a Saturday and that thing decide to let loose,” the Smoky Mountain News quotes one emergency official.
There have been a LOT of rock slides in that area. Interstate 40 over the mountain has been closed since October because of one. Further south, US 64 is just getting ready to open again after a rock slide last fall.
March 29th, 2010 at 2:24 pm
What about the incline railway? Is it no longer operating? OK, I see that it’s been closed a few years. There’s still the chair lift, though!
April 7th, 2010 at 9:57 pm
There have been a LOT of rock slides in that area. Interstate 40 over the mountain has been closed since October because of one. Further south, US 64 is just getting ready to open again after a rock slide last fall.