Blue Ridge Conservancy officials have a plan in place for creating a park on 33 acres to anchor its Middle Fork Greenway, the next step in in a plan to create a walkable link between Boone and Blowing Rock.
Conservancy leaders are on a dirt road overlooking a meadow gleaming with green leaves and yellow flowers. Wendy Patoprsty, director of the Middle Fork Greenway, is pointing out areas where work will begin on the Boone Gorge Park.
“Then as you walk around this loop, you'll have a wheelchair accessible fishing pier on this end over here, a bridge that crosses over to that side of the mountain, and comes down through this really beautiful bouldery field of just heavenly rivers.," she says "It’s amazing.”
Last week, local supporters of the park gathered to see the land and celebrate raising enough money to match last year’s half-million dollar grant from the state’s Parks and Recreation Trust Fund, or PART F, to move the project forward.
The park is a key element in the long-running plan for the Middle Fork Greenway that will connect Boone to Blowing Rock. It’s a stretch where the natural world and manmade world intertwine, following the courses of the Middle Fork New River and U.S. 321.
Sometimes you can hear the rumble from the highway. Other times, all you can hear is the river and the sounds of the forest.
The greenway fits into the conservation work the Blue Ridge Conservancy is doing in its seven-county region of Northwest North Carolina, says executive director Charlie Brady.
“Right here where we are has really been like the cradle of land conservation in North Carolina," he says. "It goes back over 100 years, when you think about the Cone family, Julian Price, the work of Hugh Morton, over on Grandfather (Mountain).”
There’s currently no timetable for when the six- to seven-mile greenway will be completed. There’s still more land to be acquired, feasibility studies to be done and money to be raised.
Patoprsty says the goal is to be at the halfway point of completion in two years.