No longer will there be one set of regulations pertaining to the possession of firearms in National Park Service Areas.  Visitors will need to be aware of the regulations of the state where the park they are visiting is located.  It becomes even more complex when parks are in more than one state or regulations and ordinances are not uniform throughout a state.

An example is the Blue Ridge Parkway in the Commonwealth of Virginia.  Virginia has what are considered liberal firearms laws.  By state law you can carry a firearm as long as it is in the open and visible.  To carry one concealed you do need a permit.  Virginia law does allow counties to adopt more restrictive ordinances within their jurisdictions.  Consequently, on the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia visitors could be permitted to carry loaded rifles and shotguns in their cars except while traveling through sections of the park located in Roanoke County where loaded long guns in vehicles are prohibited.

There are those in the state of Maine that are concerned about firearms in National Parks such as Acadia.  There is a movement to pass a state law that prohibits or limits firearms in parks.  If passed this law would affect enforcement in both state and Federal parks since state law is now the basis for regulating guns in National Parks.

Public Law 111-24, Section 512 also conflicts with existing Federal laws such as those that prohibit the possession of firearms in or on Federal facilities.  This is commonly used to provide protection for Post Offices, Court Houses, military bases, and Federal buildings.  Are not National Park Visitor Centers, Offices, and Concessions buildings federal facilities?   Perhaps even the parks themselves could be considered under this law.

The new law prevents the National Park Service and the Secretary of the Interior from enforcing any regulations that prohibit the possession of firearms.  Regulations will still be in place that prohibit the carrying and use of firearms.

If you are confused by all this, you are not the only ones.  It will take some time and education to smooth out the rough spots to interpret and enforce this new myriad of laws and regulations.

Dear Heritage Partners,

We have just become aware that the North Carolina state budget passed by the North Carolina House Tuesday night would eliminate all but one of the Heritage Development Officer (otherwise known as Tourism Development Officer) positions in Western North Carolina (“Western North Carolina” being defined as everything west of Interstate 77).

We currently have five Heritage Development Officers in the 25-county Blue Ridge National Heritage Area region: Helen Ruth Almond, Leesa Brandon, Frankie McWhorter, Kaye Meyers, and Tom Holder. Another position, which was originally filled by Ron Ruehl and later by Jerry Tate, has been vacant for all of 2009.

These people are absolutely essential to the operations of the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area. The BRNHA has only four full-time staff members, and the Heritage Development Officers are our representatives “on the ground” in our 25 counties. They are the ones who have their fingers on the pulse of all the heritage and tourism initiatives that have made such a difference in the Heritage Area in the last 5 years.

Without them we could not operate our grants program or provide assistance to the 26 heritage councils that we serve. Their loss would be a crippling blow to the BRNHA, our partners, and would undo much of the progress that has been made in heritage preservation, interpretation and development as a result of BRNHA programs and grants.

Click here to read a summary of the proposed cuts. (This is a large file and will take some time to open.)

Go to page 14, item 64. If you share our concern, we urge you to contact your state House and Senate members IMMEDIATELY and let them know how important these Heritage Development Officers are to you, and how adversely their loss would affect heritage preservation AND economic development efforts in our region. Ask them to restore funding for these positions.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Thank you for your help.

Best Wishes,

Penn Dameron

Executive Director

Blue Ridge National Heritage Area

About the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area

The Blue Ridge National Heritage Area, designated by Congress and the President in November 2003, works to protect, preserve, interpret, and develop the unique natural, historical, and cultural resources of Western North Carolina for the benefit of present and future generations, and in so doing to stimulate improved economic opportunity in the region. National Heritage Areas are locally-governed institutions that encourage residents, non-profit groups, government agencies, and private partners to work together in planning and implementing programs that preserve and celebrate America’s defining landscapes.

While the Roanoke Times initially reported that the proposed project was warmly received by Virginia Recreational Facilities Authority board, which controls the Explore site (and has leased it to Vander Maten), and the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors at a presentation on April 28, I was relieved to see that an article two days later noted that some questions were being raised about this preposterous and overinflated plan. Comments on the newspaper’s discussion board also included a number of critiques.

The “Blue Ridge America” resort — complete with luxury spa, “sprawling” riverside village, cable car, swanky hotel, riverside light show pageant, super-big zip line, and golf course — is wildly out of character with the Blue Ridge Parkway. Marketing itself as the “prettiest place on the Parkway,” it would single-handedly redefine what has been for millions of Americans an escape from the “business of life.” This development would implicitly make the Parkway an appalling and sickening promoter for business-driven, man-made extravagance and wealthy self-indulgence. Indeed, the only thing that isn’t new about it is that it represents the latest in a long line of privately-promoted tourism schemes seeking to capitalize on their proximity to America’s most beloved national park site.

Vander Maten admitted as much during his presentation when he noted his hopes to “brand” the site based on its proximity to the Parkway. “That’s the selling experience. . . . I want to take it and make it like a national park on steroids,” the Roanoke Times quoted him as saying.

I’ll be writing more about this in the next little while — there are so many parts of the proposal as projected in the video to take apart that I hardly know where to begin. But the public needs to take a careful look at this before it’s allowed to go forward. With favored direct access to the Parkway, this is a development that could fundamentally change this park and what it’s been about for the last 75 years. Is this the way we want to begin the next 75?

Stay tuned.

Recent reports have brought welcome news that the state of North Carolina will purchase about 2600 acres of the spectacular Grandfather Mountain for protection as a public park. It’s about time.

The first effort to make Grandfather a park came in 1917 when owner Hugh MacRae tried to give 1400 acres at the top to the new National Park Service. NPS director Steve Mather rejected the donation, judging the acreage insufficient to protect the park from adjacent development by MacRae’s Linville Improvement Company.

The idea surfaced again in the 1920s, when a federal committee was searching for locations for new eastern national parks. Renewed calls for a Grandfather national park failed to sway the committee, which chose the Great Smokies and Shenandoah instead.

News coverage has portrayed the current purchase as the culmination of Hugh Morton’s lifelong conservation ethic and dreams of preserving Grandfather. No one has acknowledged the deeper history, or noted that this purchase comes almost exactly 60 years after the last serious attempt to buy Grandfather for public preservation.

To the degree that they acknowledge history, the accounts root Morton’s commitment to preserving Grandfather (evident in the 1990s and after) in his 1960s deflection of National Park Service plans to route the Blue Ridge Parkway “over” Grandfather. It is only fitting, these stories imply, that Morton’s descendents have finalized the deal by selling the mountain to the public.

This reading of history has the ring of poetry, of everything turning out as it should. But it’s not that simple.

The archival record makes it abundantly clear that the dream of public ownership for Grandfather was last promoted in the 1940s by conservationists associated with the development of the very Parkway that Morton fought, and that their dream was quashed by none other than Morton himself.

In the 1940s, Morton’s grandfather Hugh MacRae’s company, which had developed Linville, was in a financial crisis, and MacRae and Morton’s father sought to sell the mountain to the Park Service or the state. Worried since the 1930s that company-sponsored timbering was scarring the mountain, government officials welcomed the gesture but did not have money to buy the mountain.

In 1945, national parks supporter Harlan Page Kelsey (a Massachusetts landscape architect with ties to Linville) secured an option to buy 5555 acres for $165,000, with the expectation that the land be incorporated into the Blue Ridge Parkway. In the end, he raised only one pledge, $90,000 from John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who had helped to buy land for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

The year after Kelsey’s option expired in 1947, the state tried again to buy the mountain. But young Hugh Morton, by then at the helm of the family business, declared Grandfather not for sale at any price. Instead, he moved to develop a travel attraction there to cultivate “rich crops of tourists.”

Within a few months of inheriting the mountain in 1952, Morton bulldozed a road to one of its peaks, built his “Mile High Swinging Bridge,” and began to harvest his crops.

Three years later, Morton objected to the Park Service’s projected Parkway route at Grandfather, which, contrary to many a popular account, was never planned to go to or over the top of the mountain. But it was nearer his now lucrative summit attraction than he wanted, and he hoped to force it down the mountainside.

Deploying his political clout, media savvy, and support from three North Carolina governors and the state highway bureaucracy, Morton forced the Park Service to accept a lower route in 1968. More than a decade later, the Linn Cove Viaduct – an engineering triumph conceived by federal engineers – was built along part of the new route with no substantive involvement by Morton.

Morton continued until his death to operate the for-profit swinging bridge, nature center, and animal habitats that he had long billed as “Carolina’s Top Scenic Attraction.”

Interestingly, the state’s purchase leaves that revenue-generating portion of the mountain in the hands of Morton’s descendents’ nonprofit organization, which will run it under a state-monitored conservation easement.

Given this history, some questions arise: Is the most accessible section of the public’s new park to remain locked behind a toll gate? Will income generated (at $14 per visitor) underwrite management of the entire park, or only the Morton travel attraction?

And what of the state-Morton family partnership? We should recall that this purchase –some details of which are still unclear – continues a long state-private alliance that repeatedly placed the interests of one individual above the public good. Let us hope that the public’s interests are being better served today.

In some recent posts, I’ve been trying to give a historically-informed analysis of the “preliminary alternatives” announced back in the spring for the public’s consideration and commentary to help the Parkway staff write a General Management Plan for the park. Today’s topic? The comments I submitted in response to Question 3. Read the spring 2008 GMP newsletter and learn about the preliminary alternatives here.

Question 3. Are there parts of the preliminary alternatives that you feel strongly should not be included in the future management of the parkway?

I believe strongly that the Parkway needs to move actively and decisively away from many elements of Alternative A (the present management practices), especially in regard to the interpretive and cultural resources management program. In particular, continued management of the road as a place that penetrated a “once remote mountain region” (p. 4, column A), peopled by “quaint Appalachian settlements” commits the Parkway to perpetuating ideas about the Appalachian region that were never grounded in the actual history of the region, and are certainly no longer sustainable in the face of more than nearly forty years of high-quality historical scholarship about the region. That research is readily accessible on the Appalachian Studies Association website, and should be regularly accessed as a primary planning and interpretive resource.

On a related note, in the area of Cultural Resources Management (p. 5), I am concerned about the continued emphasis in all three alternatives on the designation of the parkway corridor as a National Historic Landmark. While I would welcome the recognition of the park’s significance that this designation would imply, I worry that including the original Parkway interpretive exhibits and cultural history sites as part of the “principal components of this designed landscape” (p. 5) would have the effect of freezing the Parkway’s presentation of the region’s history in a pre-1955 time capsule. In other words, because original Parkway designers had (erroneous) ideas about the region’s history and presented a “picturesque” view of that history that was suffused with regional stereotypes, would a National Historic Landmark-designated Parkway be expected to enshrine those erroneous pictures and sites forever in the way that Stanley Abbott or other early designers envisioned them? Or could the historical scenes offered at places like Mabry Mill, the Peaks of Otter, Humpback Rocks, and other similar locations be substantially altered to support historical interpretations more in keeping with current historical scholarship and a more complex view of the region?

Finally, as mentioned previously, I would like to see the Parkway enhance opportunities for lower-impact, physically active recreation (hiking, biking, unicycling!) and de-emphasize further developments for motorized recreation (RVs and motorcycles). In particular, I would be reluctant to see a wholesale re-making of the Parkway campground areas to accommodate large RVs. While I’m not opposed to water and electrical hookups, I think that expanding parking, widening roads, etc (as proposed on p. 7) would fundamentally change the character of Parkway campgrounds, eroding the quietness and serenity of the Parkway experience in favor of a more commercialized camping model. Additionally, as mentioned above, I think accommodating the Parkway to large gas-guzzling vehicles is the wrong focus for limited Parkway funds in an age of high gas prices and increasing environmental concern about the impact of greenhouse gases.

On Wednesday this week, for instance, I got the a link to an article from the Honolulu Advertiser describing funding shortages at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

The article reported on a recent study of the park’s resources by the National Parks Conservation Association, and noted that “Park Superintendent Cindy Orlando said the 333,086-acre park needs 64 more employees, but lacks the money to hire them. The park has about 183 employees, including seasonal workers and staff who work at the park under cooperating agreements with other agencies. ‘Remember, this is not unique to this park,’ Orlando said. ‘It’s a system-wide issue. I think it speaks to the lack of funding for the system.’

Orlando is surely, sadly, right, and good for her for speaking out. As anyone who follows the Blue Ridge Parkway knows, staffing shortages here have in recent years become severe, with our own park down 56 permanent staff members whose positions it does not have the budget to fill. Details on the effects of the Parkway’s budget shortfalls may be found on the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation’s “Parkway Facts” page.

When thinking about the Parkway’s history, it has been important for me always to bear in mind both the local and regional context in which the Parkway came to be, and the national economic and political changes — such as the Depression and New Deal –that profoundly shaped its development.

While the in-process General Management Plan may be dealing with some of those local/regional issues, the Parkway is never going to be the park it could and should be unless the national political situation changes in ways that bring substantial and sustained additional federal funding to our National Park system. For the sake of Hawaii Volcanoes and the Blue Ridge Parkway and all 389 other National Park sites, I fervently hope that the day when that change will come is nearly at hand.

Read the spring 2008 GMP newsletter and learn about the preliminary alternatives here.

Question 2. Which parts of any of the preliminary alternatives to you feel strongly should be included in the futuremanagement of the parkway?

I think there are three key aspects of the preliminary alternatives that should certainly be included in the future management of the Parkway:

(1)A comprehensive sense of the Parkway as a part of the larger region through which it runs, as described in Alternative C. This understanding of the Parkway, I hope, would extend to the interpretive program in ways that are suggested in some of the area descriptions in the “Preliminary Alternatives” document, but are not fully spelled out there. Specifically, I would like to see new interpretive media place the history of the Parkway itself within the context of the stories being told about the region. To do this effectively, a much more complex version of the region’s history – one that includes the story of tourism and the reality of conflict over land use and other related matters – will need to be told.

(2) The regionally-based comprehensive and proactive efforts to coordinate land protection and scenery conservation for the Parkway that are described in Alternative C (p. 4). If “long-term strategies for conserving views” included development of regional zoning ordinances or plans to protect the Parkway, I would favor this as well. Maintaining the Parkway in a piecemeal fashion and taking a primarily reactive approach to encroachments and threats seems likely in the long run to squander enormous staff time and energy in what may be a losing battle.

(3) Expansion of moderate-impact recreational opportunities and development of recreational interconnectedness with the region, especially the creation of multiuse trails and capacity for bicycling, again, as outlined in Alternative C. The Parkway has the potential to be an important venue for physical recreation, and expanding the capacity to accommodate bicycles would attract new audiences to the park and move it away from being seen only or mainly as a place for an automobile-based experience. In the age of high gas prices that may herald the beginning of the end of the gasoline engine and the age of the automobile, it will be important for the Parkway to lead a regional transition to other forms of recreation and, ultimately,

My husband David, and me and our boys biking the 34-mile Virginia Creeper Trail in 2005.)

travel. In addition to the multiuse trails proposed on p. 7 for urbanized areas near the Parkway, I would also like to suggest thinking about whether there are ways to link campground areas by bicycle-friendly connections or create bicycle-friendly areas near campgrounds, further enabling the Parkway to become a destination for all bicycle-oriented travelers, including families with young children. I would prefer, in summary, to see the Parkway’s money and energy spent on developing the Parkway further for non-motorized, lower impact recreation (hiking, biking, etc.) rather than enhancing the Parkway for greater use by motorized vehicles including large RVs (and motorcycles, about which I’ll comment later).

Question 1. Is one of the three preliminary alternatives (A,B,C) already close to your idea of the best way to manage the Blue Ridge Parkway? If so, which one, and how might you modify it to make it closer to your interests and concerns?

Of the three alternatives presented, Alternative C most closely represents my vision for future management of the Blue Ridge Parkway. This approach appeals to me largely because it recognizes and builds upon the Parkway’s historic connectedness to the region through which it winds. Additionally, its flexibility and adaptability honor the Parkway’s past evolution in response to changing times, social pressures, and design ideals.

As a scholar who has spent over 17 years studying the Parkway’s history, I find many elements of Alternative C to be truer to the Parkway’s origins than the plans described for Alternative B. This is the case despite the fact that alternative B is billed as the choice that would emphasize “original parkway design” and “traditional driving experience,” implying that B, not C, is the alternative most in keeping with Parkway history.

Page 4 of the “Preliminary Alternatives” publication notes that Alternative C would entail management of the Parkway “as an experience that is more integrated with the larger region’s resources and economy.” These words would warm the hearts of the citizens of Virginia and North Carolina who lobbied to establish the Parkway in the 1930s. The most prominent of those early Parkway enthusiasts, indeed, were people with close ties to the tourism businesses that already by that time dotted the region and dominated the imaginations of many civic leaders, especially in the Asheville region. Those leaders envisioned the Parkway as a preeminent economic engine for the mountain region, one that would funnel tourists to local hotels and other attractions. Without the energies of these citizens, who made the case that a park-to-park highway was worth New Deal funding and should be routed near Asheville, the Parkway as we know it would not have come into existence. The efforts of state officials in Virginia and North Carolina, furthermore, assured the completion of the land acquisition that created the Parkway corridor. Thus, in many important respects, the Parkway has always been a strongly local and regional – as opposed to purely national – project.

For years after the 1930s, as the National Park Service took firmer control of the project, however, tensions developed between local and regional interests and the Parkway. Often, that was as it should have been; the Park Service had to protect the Parkway boundary and the park from local trespass, misuse, and exploitation by embittered citizens and some of the very tourist interests that had originally supported the park. In many respects, nevertheless, the story of the Parkway from the 1930s has been the story of the Park Service’s attempts to reach a sustainable equilibrium in its relationship with the region.

Adopting Alternative C might be a welcome step toward that desired equilibrium. A flexible, regionally-oriented management plan, it would allow the Parkway to recognize and acknowledge its own role as a player within a larger region, and as a park whose fate is inextricably bound up with that region. Taking this fact as a starting point for management promises a realistic and authentic decision-making process that accounts for the myriad effects that changes in the region continue to have upon the park. Additionally, regionally-oriented thinking about the park offers exciting possibilities for new interpretive directions that would more fully tell the Parkway’s history to the public, as well as helping the public to understand the issues that have continually shaped that history.

Alternative B, meanwhile, proposes that the parkway would continue to be thought of and managed as “a traditional, self-contained, scenic recreational driving experience and designed landscape.” Trying to maintain the parkway as a “self-contained” entity is both out of congruence with the park’s history and unrealistic in light of its present context and challenges. Additionally, past attempts to seal the Parkway off from the region have been the source of many a conflict (witness the 1950s hullabaloo over Parkway tolls and enhanced visitor facilities along the Parkway, discussed in Chapter 7 of Super-Scenic Motorway); working in a more open and collaborative way with regional interests, while challenging, would seem likely to produce greater support for the Parkway in the communities that make up its “borrowed landscape.”

That said, there are three components of Alternative C that I would suggest be modified in order to assure that the flexible, open process does not destroy things that are central to the Parkway’s original purposes or bring changes that substantially degrade the visitor experience:

Concessions: Despite the fact that concessions policy has historically been a source of conflict with regional interests, I would suggest retaining Alternative B’s recommendations for concessions service (“Continue to find ways to provide viable concession services at all existing locations . . .,” page 6). Perhaps there are ways to provide more opportunities for local communities to participate in concessions (farmer’s markets? local foods in restaurants?), but for visitors, especially those who are camping, it would be impractical and frustrating to have to leave the Parkway for every bag of ice or package of marshmallows. Although what is offered in local communities is often extensive, the fact remains that local communities are often a considerable distance from the Parkway recreation areas. In the age of high gas prices and global warming, maintaining some limited concessions facilities on the Parkway seems wise.

Campgrounds: I would suggest retaining Alternative B’s recommendations about RV sites in campgrounds (e.g. “Upgrade existing RV sites in select campgrounds with water and electrical hookups,” p. 7) instead of taking the more expansive approach (especially in terms of widening roads, expanding turning radii, and enlarging parking) to providing for RVs that Alternative C proposes. Nothing about Alternative C’s general approach dictates that the Parkway must pave over more ground to open its campgrounds to huge and ostentatious RVs of whatever size, to the detriment of the quieter, simpler (tent-based) camping experiences that have long been part of the Parkway experience. Again, in an age of rising environmental consciousness, accommodating the Parkway fully to gas-guzzling RVs and other large vehicles seems to send the wrong message and actually work against many of the Parkway’s purposes as identified on p. 2 of the “Preliminary Altneratives” document (including conservation, and “high quality scenic and recreational experiences”).

Partnerships: Although I myself am a member of the Board of a partner organization (Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation), I would urge that the Parkway approach the partnerships portion of Alternative C with caution. As history shows, private entities are all too willing to exploit the Parkway for private gain. Maintaining an appropriate balance that makes room for private partnerships that support the Parkway’s mission while reining in private – especially commercial – interests that (overtly or covertly) subvert the public interest will be an ongoing challenge. Therefore, I would encourage more conservative language about partnerships in Alternative C, perhaps language that is closer to what is in Alternative A.

In conclusion, I advocate adoption of Alternative C, with the caveats that the park staff continue to vigilantly protect the Parkway from private exploitation at the expense of the public interest and retain the quiet, noncommercial experience the Parkway was intended (especially by its early NPS leadership) to provide.

Partly we should care because the Parkway is under legal mandate to have a GMP under the National Parks and Recreation Act of 1978. That act directs all parks to develop a GMP to guide and rationalize park management for a fifteen-to-twenty-year period. Is writing a GMP in part an effort at not-too-sexy-sounding “compliance,” then? Well, yes, but it’s much more important than that implies.

The main reason we should care is that the writing of the GMP – the first the Parkway has ever had – provides us with a key moment to take hold of a Parkway that was given to us by history and make it ours, and our children’s. So far as I am aware, this is almost the first time since the Parkway was finished in the 1980s – and maybe since its earliest days in the 1930s – that there has been a chance to think broadly and systematically about what the essence of this Parkway is, who it should serve, how it should fit into a its ever-changing landscape, and how it should be re-created for a twenty-first century public. And the public has been invited into this conversation in a way they never were in the 1930s. In short, this could be a watershed moment for the Parkway.

Having spent so many years thinking about how the Parkway was created – what the essence of the early Parkway was, who it served, who got to weigh in on its planning, and how it was shaped by its region – I thought I should take time to provide comments on the General Management Plan’s “Preliminary Alternatives” document during the recently closed “public comment” period. You can read the preliminary alternatives for yourself online here.

The final lines of my book remind us that the “ongoing creation of the Blue Ridge Parkway now lies in our hands.” I take that statement seriously and believe I have a responsibility – as a scholar, a citizen, and a lover of this park – to add my voice to those discussing the Parkway’s future. I believe, furthermore, that history does help illuminate our path, and over the next few blog entries, I want to share with you some of the insights history suggested to me about the three proposed alternatives for future Parkway management. The materials are organized as they were submitted – in response to specific questions posed in the planning document. So check back next week for my answer to Question 1: “Is one of the three preliminary alternatives (A,B,C) already close to your idea of the best way to manage the Blue Ridge Parkway? If so, which one, and how might you modify it to make it closer to your interests and concerns?”

Four or five gunshot wounds were in Catherine D. Bauer when her dead body was found Monday afternoon in a wooded part of the Cherokee Indian Reservation, the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department reported Tuesday.

No arrests had been made at the time, the department spokesman said, but he added: `We might have something tomorrow.’

Mrs. Bauer, 74, widow of Fred B. Bauer, was a former school teacher in the Fontana and Brevard school systems. She had moved recently to Cherokee from Brevard. Funeral services were held Tuesday in Brevard.

She reportedly lived alone in a trailer off Soco Road. The body was found in a wooded area off Hyatt Cove Road near the Blue Ridge Parkway, about five miles from where she resided.

This was just one tantalizing tidbit I ran across while doing the research for my book – one of many that ended up relegated to a footnote in the final manuscript. A story that had only tangential relationship to my main narrative, it wasn’t a thread I had the time to pull. Still, I have wondered all these years, what happened to Catherine Bauer?

A cursory search of subsequent days’ papers – which I did conduct after finding this article – revealed no immediate resolution to the question of who killed the dynamic white woman who, with her Cherokee husband Fred Bauer, had in the 1930s galvanized the Cherokee tribe in a five-year campaign against the Blue Ridge Parkway. At that time, Mrs. Bauer had been well known on the Qualla Boundary as a teacher in the local school and the wife of the fiery Vice Chief. Together, they had railed against a project that they characterized as a modern day land grab, part of a larger government plot to return the nation’s Indian peoples to a state of dependency and isolation from mainstream America.

The full story of Cherokee opposition to the Parkway is told in Chapter 5 of my book, but the upshot was that the Bauers’ actions garnered the Cherokees a substantial cash settlement for their Parkway lands and likely prevented the scenic highway from being built along the route where today U.S. 19, the Harrah’s casino, and other substantial private and tribal tourist-oriented development lies. Pushing the Parkway up onto the reservation’s ridges left this valley area available for the Cherokee-generated development that the Bauers preferred to government-sponsored tourism.

After the Parkway battle was resolved, Catherine Bauer and her husband moved away from the Qualla Boundary for many years, and Fred Bauer died in 1971.

How did a woman who had played such an important role in the Eastern Cherokees’ history come to such a sad end? Clues, anyone?

Abhijit at Parkway entrance sign ...

Have you noticed how news becomes more impactful the closer it is to home, or if the event or person is known to you or known by someone you know?

Such was my experience last week when I received a call from a former Parkway staff member who started off by saying “have you seen the photo of the Duke University student (Abhijit Mahato) that was killed? …this guy actually visited the Parkway.”

Abhijit Camping Along the Blue Ridge Parkway

And with a little bit of searching, there it was … the most authority rendering photograph of a young man standing in front of a Blue Ridge Parkway entrance sign. The question still lingers as to what kind of visitor or Parkway champion he might have become. Interesting in the composite of photos available, he is also seen cooking a 2-egg breakfast over a gas stove at a campground in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and . We know of at least three perfect places he visited.

Abhitjit standing on the pedestrian bridge at the Nantahala Outdoor Center

Such a tragedy …

If you wish to know more about this promising young man, visit news coverage here ….

Family enjoying a picnic at the Chestnut Cove Overlook south of Asheville

For generations people have come to the Parkway to be inspired, soothed, awed and enlightened. Those who journeyed here as children years ago return now with children and grandchildren. For them the promise of the Parkway thrives not only in a quiet escape to natural splendor, but also in the joy of sharing a profound and unforgettable moment in a predictable safe environment. Loaded weapons have no place on the Blue Ridge Parkway or any national park.

There is another picture of reality and that is the one the public is more often to see on the Parkway now than one did even years ago — a national park ranger with a fully loaded firearm on one side of his utility belt and a stun gun Taser on the other. I am somewhat conditioned for this experience because I am around it so often; but I admit, there is a always a slight angst of uncomfortableness in being in this proximity. I resolve my issue each time with the question — am I glad that this guy is here standing next to me or in the overlook? The answer is always “yes”.

Now Senator Tom Coburn – R-Oklahoma – is advocating for guns in our national parks and has introduced a bill that would allow gun owners to carry loaded, accessible firearms into national wildlife refuges and parks, including the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. See related story in the Asheville Citizen Times.