The Blue Ridge Parkway, America's Favorite Drive
Near Roanoke, Virginia
The Blue Ridge Parkway enters the Roanoke Valley from the south, crossing the Roanoke River on a concrete arch bridge and threading through a narrow corridor of ridge and forest before arriving at the Roanoke Mountain Loop and the Mill Mountain Spur. For a stretch of roughly twelve miles, the parkway is essentially part of the city's geography, an improbable green seam stitched through an industrial metro area, and then it continues north toward the Peaks of Otter and the Shenandoah Valley beyond. The parkway was conceived during the Depression as a scenic motor road connecting Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina and Tennessee, four hundred sixty-nine miles in total.
Construction began in nineteen thirty-five and continued, in fits and starts dictated by funding and World War Two, until the last section was finally completed in nineteen eighty-seven at Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina. The parkway was thus fifty-two years under construction, which makes it one of the longest-running public works projects in American history. The design philosophy was consistent throughout: no commercial vehicles, no billboards, no private development visible from the roadway, a speed limit of forty-five miles per hour that was meant to encourage looking rather than arriving.
Landscape architect Stanley Abbott, who oversaw the parkway's design, described it as a linear park rather than a highway, and the distinction was not merely semantic. The roadbed was graded to follow the ridgeline, to offer overlooks rather than to move freight, to make the act of driving itself the destination. Roanoke serves as the largest city directly adjacent to the parkway along its full length.
The Explore Park near milepost one fifteen, operated by Roanoke County, is one of the gateway attractions. The Appalachian Trail crosses the parkway in the Roanoke area, and the combination of the two long-distance routes makes this section one of the more accessible wild-feeling landscapes within easy reach of any city on the parkway's corridor.
