July 29, 2010

Protectors Of The 75 Year Old Blue Ridge Parkway Struggle

To Preserve Its Beauty

By MARTHA QUILLIN

Asheville, NC (AP) Stowed in the Blue Ridge Parkway archives are more than 850 architectural drawings from the 1930s depicting every curving mile of the scenic road, down to where wildflowers would be planted, picnic tables placed and trees cut to open panoramic mountain vistas.

Viewed this way, as a 469-mile-long garden whose meandering path is a two-lane highway, the Blue Ridge Parkway is the largest landscape architecture project in the history of the United States.

Seventy-five years after construction started, the parkway’s collective gardener, the National Park Service, struggles to keep the forest and the development beyond it from closing in.

Though the parkway passes through four national forests and other protected land as it stretches from the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina, two-thirds of the land adjacent to the road is privately held. On much of that, nothing prevents a landowner from building a house or a condominium complex or clear-cutting the trees in plain view of one of the nation’s most-visited parks.

Photo: The Blue Ridge Mountains along the Parkway

``You have no idea a piece of land is privately held until the owner goes and builds something there,’’ says Rusty Painter, land protection director for the Conservation Trust of North Carolina, one of several lands trusts that have worked for years to protect the parkway ``viewshed’’ by purchasing adjacent land or negotiating conservation easements.

``You might have 10 acres of protected land, but it only takes one acre with one giant house on it to essentially destroy the integrity of that view,’’ Painter said.

Protecting the land
Over the years, the Conservation Trust has worked with other land trusts and government agencies to protect more than 30,000 acres along the Parkway. This year, the organization is pushing a bill introduced in both houses of Congress that would appropriate $75 million over five years to buy land and easements for 50,000 additional high-priority acres along the parkway.

Even on land over which it does have control, the Park Service is at a disadvantage. A decade of tight budgets has forced the loss of about a third of the parkway’s maintenance staff, leaving 80 people to mow the grassy shoulders, trim the trees, keep up the campgrounds and tend the historic buildings.

Seasonal employees and a legion of volunteers help, but in some places overlooks are completely blocked by overgrown trees, and sections of road were closed into the spring because of winter rockslides that had to cleared.

``It really makes the operation more challenging,’’ says Phil Francis, parkway superintendent.

On the parkway’s 75th anniversary, the view has other threats, too. Especially where it comes close to urban areas - Asheville and Blowing Rock, N.C., and Roanoke and Wintergreen, Va. - trespass by adjacent landowners is a problem. Neighbors have cut parkway trees to improve the views from their porches, built driveways, sheds or garages on parkway land or used it to dump trash. In more rural areas, professional poachers have illegally harvested so much galax, black cohosh and ginseng off parkway lands that local, legal hunters are unable to find the plants to sell.

Dangers abound
Natural pests harass the parkway; the woolly adelgid is busy killing Fraser firs at higher elevations. Smog has helped diminish ridgetop views in some areas by as much 80 percent since the road was built.

But the biggest problem, Francis says, is protecting the parkway views, those carefully imagined landscapes painted in the minds of long-ago architects and brought to life through the windshields of as many as 20 million visitors a year.

If too many of those pristine views are lost, visitors have said in surveys, they’ll stop coming. They will stop spending their money in the hotels and rental cabins, restaurants, gift shops and attractions that bring an estimated $2.3 billion a year to communities near the parkway in the two states.

The parkway got its start as a means of bringing jobs and money to the mountains. It was discussed in various terms by tourism promoters in North Carolina and Virginia for a couple of years before being authorized as a public works project under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1933. It fell to the states to gather the land for the roadway, which would then be deeded to the National Park Service.

In her book, ``A Blue Ridge Parkway History,’’ Anne Mitchell Whisnant writes that North Carolina highway officials realized early on that the right-of-way would need to be wider than the prescribed 200 feet. Though it would be that narrow in some places in Virginia, in this state, officials often took as much as 800 feet, angering property owners who waited years for payment but securing a broader buffer between the road and what might happen in the future beyond its borders.

Even that wasn’t enough to protect the area around the Orchard at Altapass, an apple orchard planted by the Clinchfield Railroad in 1908 on a south-facing slope north of the community of Spruce Pine.

Bill Carson, retired from IBM and living in Spruce Pine, bought the orchard with his sister in the mid-1990s when she saw an ad in the local weekly saying it was for sale. Four other people had left messages on the seller’s answering machine inquiring about the property, including a neighbor who wanted to combine it with his land and build houses on it. Carson and his sister happened to call as the seller was walking in the door. He answered the phone, and they made a deal.

Sitting in a low gap in the ridgeline with direct access to the parkway, the orchard is plainly visible to southbound drivers.

Houck Medford started the nonprofit Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation in 1997 to raise money for parkway projects that would otherwise go unfunded. Medford calls what might have been built on the orchard property ``trophy houses.’’

Instead, parkway travelers approaching the property see the big red apple barn against the green trees and follow the gravel drive to see what’s inside.

There’s a general store, with mountain crafts and jars of jam and apple butter. In the fall, there are 40 varieties of apples. And year-round, several days a week, there’s a different kind of picking, with live music by local performers. People come from several counties to listen and dance on the wood floor of the former packing house.

``We can’t save it all, but we can save the good stuff,’’ says Carson, who believes that keeping the land from being developed helps preserve mountain culture.

There is also a broader conservation effort in the area. Around the orchard, the Conservation Trust has since protected four other tracts, one of which included a 1.5-mile section of the Revolutionary War-era Overmountain Victory Trail. A developer had laid out plans for vacation homes on it.

Though the recession has slowed the pace of development on land adjacent to the parkway, it has also crimped the budgets of private and public land trusts.

A recent ad offered for sale a 48-acre site along the parkway that includes Tanbark Ridge near Asheville. The ad touted ``beautiful old growth woods with spectacular bold creek and amazing native floral!’’ It mentioned a trail that connects with the Mountain-to-Sea Trail. All for $699,000.

Landowner’s conscience
``It’s an opportunity,’’ says Painter of the Conservation Trust, who knows the property and says a land trust in the area would like to buy it. ``We just need money.’’

Joe Arrington won’t get that kind of money for the land he just sold to the Conservation Trust to keep it from being developed.

His father and grandfather bought a 180-acre tract near Balsam Gap, south of Waynesville, in the 1930s for $3 to $5 an acre. They sold a piece from the mountaintop down to the parkway when the road came through in the 1940s, and kept the rest for hunting grouse, gathering firewood and as a hedge against poverty in their old age.

Now Arrington is 69, retired from his job as a rural mail carrier, and he needs some cash. He could have sold to a developer - in the boom years, the land appraised for $15,000 an acre - but he chose to settle for a lower price and have the land protected so his granddaughters can see the same views he has enjoyed his whole life. He sold 64 acres to the Conservation Trust of North Carolina and donated 46.

Rarified air
The Conservation Trust plans to turn Arrington’s 110 acres over to the National Park Service. He kept the 25 acres around his house.

Pulling his Toyota pickup off a parkway overlook at Looking Glass Rock, several miles south of the property and more than 5,000 feet above sea level, he takes a deep breath. The air smells different. It’s cool. It tastes like Christmas trees and spring water, as it did when he used to ride horses into these mountains as a teenager. The same as when he and his wife used to have picnics in the area when their children were young.

Arrington is not against all development, he says. He wishes that those who do build within sight of the parkway would do so with some sensitivity: smaller houses, more natural colors, less tree-clearing.

Francis, the parkway superintendent, says the parkway is beginning discussions with the 29 county governments along the parkway that might eventually result in that kind of cooperation.

The parkway, Arrington says, ``provided jobs at the end of the Depression. But it’s not like going out and buying a new car, and then it’s gone.

``What they did left us a legacy. It becomes a part of you.’’

Tactile Aquarium For The Blind& Visually Impaired Opens

At Pine Knoll Shores, NC

Winston-Salem, NC (AP) Rebecca Fuller and Bill Watkins can see, but they think about museums like people who can’t.

What would there be to touch? What would there be to hear?

At an aquarium, the answer is ``nothing much.’’

Fuller is a sculptor who started building museum displays and models 30 years ago. Watkins, her husband and a former architect, helps her. Four years ago, they landed a $426,240 grant through the U.S. Department of Education’s National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research to investigate what kinds of museum displays that you can touch, called tactile displays, convey the most information.

They tested and interviewed 100 sighted and low-vision and blind adults and children, asking them to feel different models and textures.

Photo: A tactile cowfish at the Pine Knoll Shores, NC, Aquarium

Their final project using the DOE grant are 3D tactile models of fish that will be on display at the N.C. Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores starting in early July. Some of the fish are textured with a gritty surface, they illustrate patterns that blind people can’t see, such as stripes.

The fish are not just meant to be touched, they also talk. Watkins designed the fish to be interactive. The models are mostly made out of plastic, fiber glass and Bondo, a kind of putty often used by car body shops. Watkins laid carbon fiber fabric underneath. The fabric is hooked up to wires and a circuit board, which runs to a small speaker. When you touch the fish, electricity from your hand actives the system and the fish starts to ``talk’’ about itself.

Fuller and Watkins picked fish as a general theme to plan an exhibit around because aquariums seem particularly inaccessible to the blind. They’ve made tactile aquarium displays before, jellyfish, coral and sea anemones for the New York Aquarium in Brooklyn, for one, but never anything with an auditory component. ``Just imagine what it would be like to have low vision and go to an aquarium,’’ Fuller said. ``You’d just hear a little bubbling and that would be all you’d get.’’

When the Pine Knoll Shores aquarium was renovated four years ago, staff and designers tried to incorporate exhibits that low-vision and blind people could enjoy, such as large-type displays and a tactile, 3D map of North Carolina. The aquarium already had touch tanks with horseshoe crabs, whelks and spider crabs. They added one with skates and rays. There are live-animal programs where visitors can touch an alligator or a jellyfish, and there are interactive displays, like a cart stocked with local shells.

But there still wasn’t anything that a blind person could do on their own. ``Really, there wasn’t a good experience, if you were blind, that you could independently learn about the fish without something telling you about it,’’ said Georgia Minnich, the aquarium’s exhibits curator.

``Fintastic! Weird and Wonderful Adaptations for Survival in the Sea’’ opened July 8. The exhibit will be up for two years, Minnich said. If the talking fish are successful, they’ll be incorporated into other exhibits.

The grant is helping the aquarium pay for other improvements to make the exhibit accessible, including a raised map and a textured walkway. Tiles will replace carpeting so blind people can follow a path with their feet or with their cane. There will be four tanks with live fish, too, filled with examples of some of the Carolina coast’s stranger inhabitants, spiny burrfish that can puff up, and sea robins that get their name from their large pectoral fins that make them look like a bird in flight.

Fuller and Minnich hope that everyone, blind or not, will take away something from Fintastic.

Fintastic features eight kinds of fish, from the diminutive, so-ugly-it’s-cute cowfish to a 9-foot long hammerhead shark that used to reside in the aquarium director’s office. Fuller and Watkins sculpted about half of the fish, the rest are from mounted fish models that the aquarium already owned. All are North Carolina species, and all were selected because they represent some kind of adaptation that fish have made, from the black striped pattern on the sides of a spadefish, they act as camouflage, to the shape of a body, fish with flat underbellies tend to be bottom dwellers.

``It’s trying to teach some principles about fish. We choose ones really quite different from each other,’’ Minnich said. Fuller and Watkins want other designers to incorporate their ideas when they work on projects. ``The whole idea is to make people who go to museums more independent,’’ Watkins said. ``Right now, a blind or low-vision person has to have someone with them to tell them what’s there. It’s really about civil rights. If the public is going to be invited into a place, they ought to be able to get information.’’

Building displays is a field Fuller fell into after she landed a job designing a White House model for the Gerald Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich. Her company is called RAF Models, Inc.

In the early 1990s, she and her husband bid on a project for the National Park Service in Hot Springs, Ark. The park service invited artists to submit plans for a model of the Fordyce Bathhouse and other buildings in Bathhouse Row at Hot Springs National Park. But they needed to be accessible to the blind.

Fuller and Watkins are in the final stages of finishing the fish before they take them to Pine Knoll Shores for installation.

Fuller didn’t know much about fish before she started this project. The Peterson Fish Guide and other field guides are scattered around their basement workshop in Washington Park, along with photos and drawings. A dead cowfish floats in a jar, posing for Fuller as she sculpts a model into clay. A snaky moray eel undulates in mid-air, attached to a table saw, where Watkins has been sanding him smooth. Fuller built his body out of foam swimming noodles.

The eel was particularly tricky to research, Fuller said, because it was hard to find full-body photos. ``They always show the face and the mouth. I couldn’t get an idea of how their fin got thinner toward the tail. You really have to have a lot of stuff because you just keep running up against questions.’’

Fuller remembers one man they interviewed for the research, a man in his 50s who had been blind since birth. He didn’t realize that there are different kinds of fish, thousands of species that all look very different from each other.

``That’s why we go to an aquarium,’’ Fuller said. ``It’s like you can open a window for people.’’