Near the top of the W Road, several yards below the lowest switchback and beneath a massive jutting boulder, a 15- to 20-foot section of the northbound lane shows evidence of a crescent-shaped sinking area. In a couple of spots the pavement sags as much as four inches.
Hamilton County officials said last week they've received a number of calls from Signal Mountain drivers about the spot.
"We've got some movement up there," Highways Director Harold Austin said last week. "We think it's all right. We are continuing to keep an eye on it."
Mr. Austin said people are more alert to slide possibilities since the December 2009 road collapse that closed U.S. Highway 27 up Signal Mountain and landslides that have kept U.S. Highway 64 through the Ocoee Gorge closed for months.
He said the county has worked on the W Road several times lately with "routine" maintenance. A tarlike material recently was poured into pavement cracks to help keep moisture out of the roadbed when it rains, he said.
"That's what does the damage, water getting underneath (the road)," Mr. Austin said, adding that the old road was built in the 1930s. It was a wagon trail before that.
"We've always got concerns anytime on a road like that. That's why we keep monitoring it."
Larry Cook, executive director of the North Chickamauga Creek Conservancy, looked at the road last week. The conservancy owns the property just below the area where the pavement appears to be loosening.
"It could be as harmless as loose material settling a little bit," he said. "The county acknowledges things are moving around, but that on its own doesn't necessarily mean it's going to fail," Mr. Cook said, looking at the road and the bluff above and below it.
There are no obvious new cracks in the overhanging rock, and there's no way from the road to judge the integrity of the rock wall below, he said.
Decades of history
The upper portion of the rock-lined road is on the National Register of Historic Places, meaning that any rebuilding requires keeping the flavor of the Works Progress Administration, officials have said.
But the W's history began long before the 1930s WPA.
What eventually became the W Road began as a wagon trail up Walden's Ridge several years after Hamilton County was opened to white settlers about 1835.
In 1840, the Tennessee Legislature authorized a toll turnpike, Anderson Pike, that followed an Indian foot trail along the top of Walden's Ridge from Sequatchie Valley to the north bank of the Tennessee River.
Not until 1911 was the W Road graveled. In 1927, it was widened from 15 feet to the current 24 feet. It was not paved for several more years, according to historians.
Preventive fixes
Last week, Mr. Austin said the "sinky place" is built on a rock wall ledge about 20 or 30 feet high, some of the original work of WPA crews.
He said the same heavy fall rains that closed the Ocoee's U.S. Highway 64 brought a few small boulders and rubble slides onto the W Road.
County road crews used machinery to pull loose ground and stones from some of the overhangs. A few weeks later, a stormy night felled a number of trees over the road, and local drivers started calling in and asking for trees to be cut, he said.
"We went back and cut the ones that were leaning, and then we got a call from them that we'd cut too many trees, and now it was going to wash away," he said with a wry laugh.
Mr. Cook said he knows it must be a dilemma for the county, and he shook his head trying to think what might be done to shore up the old road.
"We know from walking the property below that there's a lot of loose rock (in the wooded slopes below the W's wall)," he said. "It's hard to say how they could fix it."
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