The Blue Ridge Parkway Is a Treasure. Treat It Like One.

By Harlan Pettigrew, columnist

I drove the Blue Ridge Parkway from the Peaks of Otter to Mabry Mill on a warm Saturday in March. It rained on me twice, which the Parkway has been doing to people since 1935, and there was mist on the range at milepost 115 that looked like someone had painted it there with a dry brush. I don’t say any of that to romance you. I say it because it is the truth, and because this truth is in trouble.

The National Park Service’s fiscal year 2026 budget request treats the Parkway, which is the most-visited unit of the National Park System, the way a hurried landlord treats a rental on the way to being sold. Deferred maintenance across its 469 miles now sits at roughly $600 million. Three of its campgrounds — Rocky Knob among them — ran reduced seasons last year because the Park Service couldn’t staff them. Six overlooks between Roanoke and Asheville are closed outright because the retaining walls underneath them are failing.

You can call this a national problem. It is not only a national problem. It is ours.

The Parkway is the reason the Roanoke Valley appears on travel-section lists that would otherwise never mention us. It is a quarter of the reason Mill Mountain was protected, the Roanoke Star has a view worth climbing to, and our bed tax comes in every year on schedule. In October, when the hardwoods turn, it is the single most valuable piece of infrastructure we collectively own a piece of — and we do not own it alone.

The Parkway’s Roanoke region stretch runs past the Peaks of Otter, along Bent Mountain, across the shoulder of Apple Orchard Mountain, and out to Smart View. It is, on any given October weekend, half of why Center in the Square has a good weekend. This is not a sentimental claim. It is a line item.

So when the National Park Service cannot keep a retaining wall up near milepost 125, and the pull-off where half of Roanoke proposed marriage between 1978 and 2004 is closed because nobody has poured $180,000 of concrete, the right response from this region is not a sympathetic sigh. It is a phone call to the congressional delegation and a line in every local budget that says: “We will pay our share.”

I don’t know precisely what our share is. But I know that the Friends of the Blue Ridge Parkway, which does more for the road on a shoestring than it has any right to, is running a fundraising campaign right now that is $2.1 million short of its annual goal. I know that the Roanoke Valley Greenway Commission has quietly started conversations about matching maintenance on overlooks inside the city limits. And I know that if I were on City Council, I would be asking whether a dollar or two of every bed tax dollar ought to have “Blue Ridge Parkway” written on it.

The Parkway was built in the teeth of the Great Depression by people who had no money and no good reason to believe it would ever be finished. It got finished. It was built as an act of public love. The least we can do, ninety years later, is treat it like one.