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Stakeholders make plans to preserve Blue Ridge Parkway's iconic views

A scene from the Blue Ridge Parkway, which is almost 470 miles long. Image courtesy of the National Park Service.

A scene from the Blue Ridge Parkway, which is almost 470 miles long. Image courtesy of the National Park Service.

Blue Ridge Parkway officials are putting together a plan to boost tourism on the scenic road and increase the economic impact in the nearby communities.

When about 150 people gathered in Blowing Rock last month for the Blue Ridge Rising summit, it marked the first time that stakeholders from all of the 29 counties traversed by the parkway came together to plan for its future.

Topics included developing itineraries for visitors who are looking for specific things like kid-friendly hikes or dog-friendly trails. Or how to bring more people to underused parts of the park.

Almost 16 million people visited the parkway in 2021, making it the most visited of the country’s national parks. The vast majority are there to take in the spectacular views, says Carolyn Ward, CEO of the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation.

She says the mountain region is among the most resilient against climate change. And that could lead to more people coming into the area, creating a threat to those vistas.

"There’s going to be enormous population increases in this area," she says. "So if we can collectively come together and think about how we plan for that, it will help us protect the mountains, protect the views. You could just imagine what the viewshed along the parkway could look like if we are not careful.”

Ward says the summit and an earlier series of regional meetings led to almost 60 action strategies. A full plan is expected to be finalized in the coming months, but some of the ideas are already being implemented.

 

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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