"The Snake" - Hwy 421 & 34 - By Akumu

My #1 road in The Smokys. It should be #1 on this site, but I'm glad it's not. If it was it would suffer from it's success like The Tail of the Dragon does, and be practically unrideable thanks to people putting around it at 25mph. No, people don't seem to particularly like the idea of coming 'all the way' up to Mountain City/Shady Valley to ride this. Good. Keeps it safer, makes it easier for clean runs of this utter ribbon of perfection that I strongly recommend doing down and back, the whole way. It has it all with tight twisties, off camber twisties, hairpins, loose sweepers, flowing sweepers, tighter sweepers and even the occasional straight and passing lane and lots of pull offs for the slower traffic to move over. (Though, sometimes they don't.) I only get to the area once a year, but on the ride down to Asheville we run this route both ways, and 4 days later on the way home we do it again. It's the only road on the 50+ we do, that we do twice. It's that good, to me. Just talking about it makes me miss it. :(