A 20-mile stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway reopened Monday August 22, 2013, a little more than a month after a giant crack formed in the roadway and forced its shutdown. Construction workers built temporary bypass lanes for two-way traffic between Milepost 376 and Mount Mitchell State Park, just north of Asheville, NC. The crack has been repaired and paved over; a permanent, multi-million dollar fix for the nation's most popular road starts in November 2013. The parkway reopened just days before the Labor Day 2013 holiday weekend, one of the busiest travel periods on the parkway. The crack, which had become something of a tourist attraction, was about 6 inches wide, several feet deep and 300 feet long.
