Driving down the Blue Ridge Parkway on a sparkling fall day, with the leaves beginning their annual show and distant peaks painting the horizon blue, it's hard to believe that this road is in trouble.

But anyone who knows the parkway -- a 469-mile-long national park that stretches from Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia -- can tell you it's not what it used to be.

Budgets have failed to keep up with rising costs, leaving campgrounds and visitors' centers in need of repair and forcing them to open later and close earlier. Rangers who once led nature walks and campfire programs have all but disappeared.

And many of the park's trademark vistas are hidden by brush and trees. A shrinking maintenance staff has abandoned nearly 250 of the approximately 1,200 vistas that were part of the park's original design.

At the same time, a development boom is dotting some of the park's most scenic views with condos, golf courses and shopping centers. In Roanoke, Va., a Wal-Mart is planned about a quarter-mile from the parkway.

The National Park Service, which owns only the road and a narrow ribbon of land that borders it in most places, has little money to protect its views from development.

"The things that draw people to the parkway are disappearing," said J. Scott Graham, who makes his living photographing the park.

"A lot of the mountain scenes that I have shot over the years, those views are gone," Graham said. "Unless you want golf courses, smokestacks, shopping centers and residential development in your pictures."

Views arranged just so

The Blue Ridge Parkway was a Depression-era public works project that was started in 1935 and finally completed in 1987. And it is not just a road.

It is a carefully planned park, its winding route peppered with overlooks, campgrounds, picnic areas, hiking trails, visitors' centers and historic buildings.

Each mile of road was laid out by landscape architects who envisioned an aesthetically perfect drive: lush mountain foliage, arranged just so, punctuated by panoramic vistas of the surrounding mountains.

Nearly every shrub and tree planted alongside the road were plotted in hand-drawn maps, which specify areas where trees should be cleared to make room for grass, where underbrush should be cut back to give the forest a more open feel, where rhododendrons should be planted in lines to direct the eye to a certain distant peak.

Virtually every sweeping mountain view, the attraction that draws about 20 million visitors a year to the park, is thanks to the diligence of the park service, which cuts down the trees and brush. If the service stopped cutting, it estimates, nearly all the views on the parkway would be obscured within a decade.

The result of all that planning is a spectacular drive, which is also spectacularly difficult to maintain. In the past few years, as federal cuts have eroded the park's budget, some of the original vision has been sacrificed.

"It just seems like it's dwindling," said Gene Otton, who takes a few weeks off each year from his job at a New Jersey glass factory to drive the entire length of the parkway with his wife and daughter.

They find the drive so breathtaking that they've done it for a dozen years. But in the past few years, they've noticed that the ranger programs they used to attend are gone. Some of the campgrounds where they stay have closed some sites. And they are more frustrated each year about all the trees that block the views they once enjoyed.

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