Chapter 16 - Blue Ridge Parkway, Virginia and North Carolina, United States of America

Abstract

The Blue Ridge Parkway is a unit of the U.S. National Park Service. It consists of 469 miles (755 kilometers) of road and 82,000 acres (33,185 hectares) of land in Virginia and North Carolina. The Parkway was the first U.S. limited-access national road system, free from commercial traffic, designed for recreational driving experiences. A general management plan was approved in 2013 to address the complex issues involving the extensive infrastructure within the Parkway, and the Parkway’s natural, cultural, and scenic resource diversity. The Parkway also connects the Shenandoah National Park and the Great Smoky Mountains National Parks by way of a “national rural parkway,” which has an influence on the Parkway’s objectives. This chapter briefly describes the planning process employed by the National Park Service, the management zones and alternative management concepts for these zones, and the objective analysis process used by the National Park Service. The discussion of the planning process, the outcomes of the plan, and the lessons learned illustrate several interesting ideas that can be of importance to the management of other North American forests with heavy recreational demand.