Blue Ridge Parkway

The Blue Ridge Parkway was built to be driven slowly. It runs 469 miles along the crest of the Appalachians, from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina, and it was designed so that the view, not the destination, was the point of the trip.

Construction began in 1935, in the middle of the Depression. It was a public works project as much as a road, and it put thousands of people to work. Crews from the Civilian Conservation Corps built trails, planted slopes and cleared overlooks. The work went on in pieces for more than 50 years. The last section, the Linn Cove Viaduct curving around the side of Grandfather Mountain, was finished in 1987.

The parkway's designers were landscape architects, and they treated the whole thing like a long, narrow park. There are no billboards and no trucks hauling freight. Curves follow the shape of the land. Overlooks were placed where the view opens. Along the way they kept and restored pieces of mountain life, such as old farms, split-rail fences and Mabry Mill in Virginia, so visitors would see how people lived on that land before the road came.

This board leans toward artwork and illustrated material more than old photographs. Bird's-eye views show long stretches of ridge, valley and road at a glance, the way a map can't. Drawings pick out single scenes, such as a mill, a bridge, a cabin, a bend in the road. Cards and bookmarks carry the same scenes in a smaller size.

When you look at the bird's-eye views, follow the road itself. It rarely goes straight for long, and it almost never cuts across the grain of the mountains. It rides the ridgeline, dropping into gaps and climbing back out. That was a deliberate choice. Another thing to notice is how much forest there is. Much of these mountains had been logged hard before the parkway, and the trees you see in later views are, in many places, second growth.