Part 4: Blue Ridge Parkway at 75 - diminished views

In the middle of a two-lane bridge over the Roanoke River Gorge, Roger Holnback stopped the car and got out.

"I want you to see this," he said.

He waved at a birder carrying binoculars and a camera who had walked onto the bridge, and the birder stared at Holnback's car, a Prius with "We Save Land" written across the side, blocking the southbound lane of the Blue Ridge Parkway, hazard lights flashing.

A pickup carefully skirted the car as Holnback, the executive director of the Western Virginia Land Trust, stood at the railing and pointed out a truly close call.

A Florida-based developer had, until June, planned to build what he called "a national park on steroids" along the gorge, which could have placed a luxury spa, riverside village, cable car, hotel, golf course and zip line just downstream from the parkway. Holnback looked at the white water 160 feet below, roiling over rocks and past tall trees.

Eight motorcycles rolled past the Prius. The birder put his fingers in his ears.

Nobody wants to hear it, but development is the biggest threat to the parkway's future, and Roanoke County is the biggest problem area.

In a national park carefully crafted by designers 75 years ago, the illusion of wilderness is wearing thin.

The treeless and eroding landscape of 1930s Appalachia has given way in many parts of the Roanoke Valley to strip malls and subdivisions.

"Let me show you why we worry about the Blue Ridge Parkway and Roanoke County," Holnback said.

On a map, he pointed out developments and commercial areas, each colored to indicate whether it could be seen by motorists from the parkway.

"You can see the density," he said. "What you see as you drive down the parkway are critical viewsheds where what you do can make a difference. There's a Walmart going right here. This is a huge car dealership."

He paused.

"Just because the parkway's there doesn't mean you don't need economic development," he continued. "Unfortunately, you can see them."

For today's parkway managers, the words of its lead designer, Stanley Abbott, still echo: "The only reason for the Blue Ridge Parkway is to please the viewer and so its chief concerns are beauty and interest."

Their problem is that most of the scenic views enjoyed by tourists are neither owned nor controlled by the National Park Service. Some 4,000 landowners abut the parkway along its 470 miles. Some have agreed to scenic or agricultural easements, promising to maintain the parkway's bucolic view of their undeveloped land in exchange for tax benefits.

But in other places, money also talks, and development pays better than easements.

One landowner, Holnback said, recently bought a large parcel for less than a million dollars. The parkway would like to buy it to prevent housing development, he said, but the owner is asking more than six times the price he paid.

Driving on down the road, he pointed at a slope covered with grasses and wildflowers and shrubs. Invisible behind it is a quarry.

"A little bit of a berm," he said. "It's just magic."

Then he came to a row of vinyl-clad houses on the crest of a ridge right next to the road.

"This group of houses is the worst example," he said. "It's sort of a poster child for what a developer's not supposed to do."

Below the houses, in the narrow portion of field owned by the parkway, rows of saplings have been planted by a nonprofit agency.

"Every couple of years for the past eight years, the Friends of the Blue Ridge Parkway puts in several hundred trees," Holnback said. Eventually, the houses will be screened from view, and the wilderness veneer restored.

"The loss of a few trees here or there or a trailer park makes a difference," Holnback said. "This is the reality; this is America. The parkway is not, unfortunately, so isolated from the world that you can have that wilderness experience all the time."

A few years ago, parkway managers inventoried scenic views along the road. They identified 12 types of view that a motorist might encounter, and they rated each.

"We would look at a view, and we had a process to come up with a number rating for the remaining scenic quality," said Gary Johnson, the parkway's chief of planning. "In other words, is this view still pretty? Has it been affected by cell towers, big-box development, roads - what's changed from what it was originally like?"

More than 1,200 scenic views were identified across the 29 counties crossed by the parkway in Virginia and North Carolina, ranging from a focal view of moving water (the favorite among tourists surveyed) to a focal view of a commercial crossroads (nobody's favorite). Some of the views were from the parkway's approximately 275 overlooks, others from about 850 maintained vistas and 400 agricultural lease views.

In Roanoke County, most of the views from the overlooks have changed. Beyond a sign reading "View Coyner Mountain" is a Walmart. The view at Lost Mountain is of subdivisions. The Read Mountain overlook is nearly obscured by tall pines, but still visible is a megachurch perched on a clear-cut mountaintop, surrounded by parking spaces.

The tall trees at some overlooks in part reflect a lack of funding for maintenance, but at times the growth is intentional.

"Over time, what we could begin to do is just let trees grow up and block overlooks and vistas where you can see into adjoining properties," Johnson explained. "That would completely change the experience of driving the parkway, this road that almost has this cinematic experience of openness and enclosure and this undulating woodline. There will be less of that experience of openness and enclosure. It will be more enclosed."

The survey indicated that tourists would quit coming to sections of the parkway where the scenic views had deteriorated. In the counties that border the parkway, tourism brings in $2.3 billion annually.

"Scenery is important to our visitors, and when they come here they're spending a lot of money in adjacent communities," Johnson said. "So there is an economic value to scenery."

There is still scenery on the Roanoke section of the parkway - beautiful scenery. On a recent summer day, a doe and spotted fawn sprinted across the road in the heart of the valley; nearly 20 butterflies clustered on a single stem of bright orange flowers nestled into a cliff facing Poor Mountain, some 11 miles distant. A bird called, an insect buzzed, but otherwise no sound was heard in the heat of the afternoon, no sound at all.

In 2003, a nonprofit called Scenic America designated the 28 miles of parkway through Roanoke County one of 10 "Last Chance Landscapes" in the nation, defined as a place of beauty or distinctive community character facing imminent and potentially irrevocable harm.

Congress is considering the Blue Ridge Parkway Protection Act in recognition of the 75th anniversary. If it passes, it would authorize $75 million over five years to buy properties and easements on as much as 50,000 acres, with the federal money used to leverage private funding.

It would be a start. The parkway already has scenic easements on 21,000 acres. However, that's out of a possible 500,000.

Many private access roads intersect the parkway, most of them legacies that were granted to farmers when the highway bisected their land.

"How many people could foresee from the beginning that a road with a vehicle count of two or three ox sleds and half a dozen trucks a day might one day become an access to a subdivision or a roadside motel?" wrote a member of Abbott's team in later years. "This gradually became apparent, and after July, 1938, private crossings of the parkway road were prohibited..."

And yet new paths are continually bushwhacked across park property, the majority from new houses whose owners want to take their bicycles or off-road vehicles directly to the parkway from their backyards.

"At least two out of three have access to the parkway," Holnback said, pointing out a footpath sprouting from a backyard onto the parkway as he drove past a new subdivision. "Each one of those trails, there's some degradation to flora and fauna. Trying to protect the integrity of the parkway in a built environment, it's a challenge. This is probably its toughest county to get through.

"It's easy to blame Roanoke County," he continued, "but they were here first."

Johnson said small encroachments add up.

"We are literally finding hundreds of locations where people have gone into the woods, cut out trees and planted lawns," he said. "They have gardens on us. People have built driveways across us, people have built garages on park land, landscape features like ponds, dumped trash and have created unauthorized trails across park land to go ride their bikes. We have found off-road vehicle tracks almost like racetracks built on us. It just kind of goes on and on."

More than 400 encroachments have been counted: bushwhacked trails, 100-plus; lawns and gardens, 100-plus; private roads, 40; destruction of property, 20-plus; signs, 25-plus; buildings, 40-plus.

And while some homeowners love the parkway to death, others don't love it at all. The grandson of a farmer whose land was split by the parkway has been selling parcels for development, Holnback said.

"They moved a lot of people out of Appalachia to build the parkway," he said. "That's the reality of it. So the parkway wasn't loved by everybody. But these were used lands. In 1900, there was hardly a tree in southwest Virginia.

"The woods that are there, that are the parkway corridor, that is the only place that hasn't been logged in 75 years. What's amazing is that it isn't degraded more than it is."

As the Prius rolled down the parkway, he pointed out Poor Mountain, calculating how many of the power-generating windmills planned for that ridgeline would be visible from the road. Several, he concluded, but added that he had mixed feelings about the project - green energy versus degraded view.

The solution, in many spots, may be to close overlooks and allow vegetation to grow up and block the view. Nobody likes that. Tourists come for long views of the mountains and valleys; home-

owners build on those mountains for the same reason.

And a few, finding the parkway to be a nuisance neighbor, take matters into their own hands.

Law enforcement officer Marc Cyr led a biology team to the backyard of a privately owned mountaintop house in the Wintergreen community, overlooking the sunny valley of Stuart s Draft, far below.

The front yard was trimmed and civilized, but beyond that the trees were tall, and the adjoining lots dense with the kind of little green understory plants that to an unpracticed eye might be called weeds.

This forest is the unpaved part of the parkway, and it comes, in many cases, right up to the houses.

A white sign marking

the parkway boundary was on a tree trunk, eye level to someone standing on the deck, and only a few feet away from it. The ground in front of and extending past the sign into the parkway's woods was blackened, with a few crisp brown plants poking out.

Herbicide, Cyr said.

"It's park property," he pointed out. "It's everybody's land. They treat it like it's their own."

This was the third yard he had visited that morning, investigating trespass.

"You've got your hands full here," a team member commented.

Park ecologist Chris Ulrey said the team would examine the site in detail, inventory the loss and calculate the cost - which could be charged to the homeowner - of restoring the parkway forest to its original condition.

"It could get quite expensive," he said.

Cyr took them to more sites, pointing out trash heaps on parkway land and cut trees that someone had attempted to conceal by piling rocks around the stumps. Not everyone is like that, he said; many parkway neighbors value the forest and report possible violations.

Such a call had brought him to a yard where he showed Ulrey 10 nearly naked tree trunks; the tops had been cut off, apparently to improve the view from the house.

"I would say eight of the 10 are definitely on the parkway," Cyr said.

"He might as well have cut the trees," Ulrey replied. "They were reduced in height by approximately half. They were 50 to 60 feet tall, perhaps. Under 19jj (a federal regulation), the idea is to restore the park, make it whole again. How do you make something like this whole again?"

He set his team to determining the exact park boundary, the size and age of the trees, and the species.

"I think they had somebody standing up here on the deck saying, 'Cut this one, cut this one,' " Cyr said. "It's a great view."

For the homeowner, yes. From the parkway's viewpoint, however, that person had encroached on federal land. Fines and restoration costs could be charged if the case goes to court.

For those wealthy enough to build there, that's not much of a deterrent.

"The guy who did the cutting said people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for these views, and the trees are obstructing the view," Cyr said. "People come out and say, 'Here's a check to pay the fine.' They're so rich that small fines don't bother them."

"The cost of a view," Ulrey said, and Cyr agreed: "The cost of a view."

Stanley Abbott's carefully crafted landscape of pastoral farmland, cold-water streams, rugged pioneers and well-chosen trees framing blue mountains has lasted largely intact for 75 years.

He died in 1975. When the parkway needed a new headquarters building in Asheville, N.C., his son, Carlton Abbott, designed it.

The National Park Service named a lake in Stanley's honor, at the Peaks of Otter Lodge. It is, fittingly, a man-made lake.

"He didn't get so much acclaim in his lifetime," Carlton Abbott said. "Landscape architecture is such a subtle art."

The son has done many projects for the National Park Service - at Ellis Island, Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, Assateague and Jamestown. He designed the Blue Ridge Parkway Music Center at milepost 213, a short distance from where ground was broken Sept. 11, 1935, on the road that locals called "the Scenic." He tries to stay true to the design standards set by his father.

"I remember he looked out his window once in his studio and said, 'There will never be another Blue Ridge Parkway,' " Carlton Abbott said.

On a July afternoon, a storm met Apple Orchard Mountain, the highest point on Virginia's section of the parkway, right where it suddenly leaves the protection of rock and wood and tightropes across the mountaintop.

On one side, a wind-pressed cloud imprisoned by the mountain turned into a wall of lightning-rendered fog, obscuring everything - ground, grass, trees, sky, heaven - while on the other, sunlight still shone on the valley below.

A bobcat crossing the rain-silvered highway a few miles on was taken by surprise, then bounded away into Stanley Abbott's wild woods - safe, for now.

Diane Tennant, (757) 446-2478, diane.tennant@pilotonline.com