Adventures in a Designed Landscape
We’re in Western North Carolina, off the Blue Ridge Parkway near Asheville. It’s peak leaf season. I’m audibly panting up a steep incline, spearing leaves and wet dirt with my hiking poles and feeling a little nauseous.
Today, my partner and I are on the Snowball Trail, climbing to Hawkbill Rock. My conditioning is gone after months of working from home in Florida. I’m half-consciously scanning my memory of this trail’s online reviews and trying to remember if they promised a “payoff” or “views.”
As my mind drifts to what I’ll post on Instagram later this afternoon, I remember a recent photo from the Parkway account — a before and after of a vista restoration project. A harried social media manager faced an angry commentariat. “@blueridgenps why are you cutting down trees???” I felt for her. Try breaking the news that the views are staged.
I turn to my partner and say, without context, “I think people think of the National Park Service as doing preservation work, but not necessarily designing the natural environment.”
The Parkway, though, is a feat of landscape design and engineering, built on the wave and the dollars of the New Deal in the 1930s. Before Good Roads cut through rural areas, forestry and farming left barren stretches of the Appalachian Mountains. The Parkway’s Resident Land Architect Stanley Abbot, Engineer R. Getty Browning and their teams had to design not just a road, but an entire countryside.
Workers hauled tons of soil and drilled through hundreds of feet of rock, building tunnels through solid walls. Author Ethan Carr terms it “wilderness by design.” And the original design reigns. Engineers have to go through an onerous process to so much as raise the height of a safety barrier.
The Parkway was built for automobiles. A 1951 travel article in the Washington Post suggested: “Short hikes[…]to ease tired limbs cramped in the car.” Stanley Abbot called these diversions “gems in the necklace” of the parkway, intended to break up the drive, without too much exertion.
Hiking trails have been expanded over time, often in partnership with volunteer groups and National and State Forest systems. The movement to maintain recreational trails came after the auto tourism boom, as public and political interest in hiking grew and with the passage of legislation like the Wilderness Act of 1964.
Personally, I’m hoping for a hike that justifies the drive. I stop for a glug of water. And then I trudge on toward my vista, estimating our nearness to the mountain’s ridge, and how long we’ll go without seeing other hikers. I wonder if my boots are rubbing blisters, and whether the nearby rustling is something other than a squirrel (it’s not). I take a deep breath and forget about the Parkway for a while.
And later, back at the car, we bicker over who has to drive home.
