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.

"This place was built with our tax dollars," Otton said. "Why can't they take care of the place? It's a gorgeous place if you take care of it."

Jobs empty, hiring frozen

Park Superintendent Phil Francis says the answer is in the balance sheet on his desk. The park's approximately $14 million budget comes entirely from the federal government. Congress awards the park a small increase each year, but it is often less than the cost of the pay raises that Congress mandates for his staff, not to mention rising fuel and construction costs, Francis said.

Nearly one-quarter of the park's 236 permanent jobs are empty. Francis says the park, which had a $1.5 million deficit when he took the helm a year ago, is in a hiring freeze that won't end anytime soon.

He now has only seven permanent "interpreters" who are stationed around the park to answer questions and conduct educational programs. He hires a few dozen seasonal ones, but he worries that, if the budget keeps tightening, he will have to eliminate those, too. His maintenance staff is down by 30 percent.

Bathrooms are cleaned less frequently. Downed trees take weeks to clear. Litter isn't picked up very often.

Overlooks are now cut back only once every three years. And larger trees that block views can't be removed at all. It's simply too expensive and time consuming.

Some of the overlooks just north of the Linn Cove Viaduct, one of the parkway's most scenic stretches, are so overgrown that there is no view at all. Many of the vistas that were part of the park's plan, but are not official overlook points, have been allowed to return to forest.

The park has only 34 rangers -- who respond to traffic wrecks and health emergencies, rescue stranded hikers, arrest criminals and try to stop those who grow marijuana or poach valuable wild herbs from federal land. Francis said one ranger is often responsible for more than 100 miles of road, meaning a stranded driver might wait hours for help. He estimated that the park needs50 percent more rangers to do the job adequately.

"I worry about the future," Francis said.

Dotted with development

As the park staff struggles to cover the basics, a real estate boom is transforming the ridges and valleys around the park, which is only 800 to 1,000 feet wide in most places.

From Walnut Cove Overlook, just south of Asheville, a glimpse of the parkway's future is taking shape.

This was one of the road's most scenic views, a panorama of mountains, spreading out around a small farm in the valley below. Now, the farm has been replaced by a golf course, a clubhouse and a cluster of condos. Nearly 500 homes will eventually go up in the surrounding hills, along with a fitness center, a restaurant and a small inn. Homes in The Cliffs at Walnut Cove start at $650,000, but many will go for more than $2 million.

Each year, more rooftops are popping up within view of the parkway, especially in the areas around Asheville, Boone, Blowing Rock and Roanoke.

Many developers, including the company that is building The Cliffs, say they do their best to blend into the environment, limiting the cutting of trees, using natural materials, setting homes on large lots. But they say it is unrealistic to think that the thousands of acres visible from the parkway, much of it privately owned, can remain unchanged.

"The road is on the ridges," said Doug Miller, a regional president for Ginn Resorts, a Florida company that is building Laurelmor, a 1,500-home community near Boone that will be partially visible from the parkway. "I don't see how you could possibly avoid seeing some development. And with a very low-density project, as you're driving along at 45 mph, I don't think you're going to see much of it."

Parkway officials say the best they can do is try to make the development less jarring to the eye. They meet with developers and lay out the materials that look best, ask for buildings low enough to be hidden by trees, homes spaced far apart, clad in natural tones. Gary Johnson, the parkway's chief of resource planning, said he has worked out enough modifications to the Roanoke Wal-Mart -- a buffer of trees, a landscaped parking lot -- that it will be hardly noticeable to drivers. In other cases, he has persuaded companies to develop more heavily on land that is not visible from the road and to agree to leave land near the parkway untouched.

But in some cases, Johnson said, his recommendations are ignored. He points to the stark, angular condominiums that now dominate the sweeping view from the front porch of the Moses Cone mansion, a historic home near Boone that the park service runs.

"It's rare that you find a developer who will compromise the bottom line for scenic values," Johnson said.

Johnson said it doesn't help that 40 percent of the jobs in his department are vacant. A community planner, who made connections with communities and developers along the parkway's route, quit five years ago and hasn't been replaced.

Now, Johnson says, he tries to work with the developers of projects most threatening to the parkway. But in most of the 29 counties that the parkway runs through in North Carolina and Virginia, he has little idea what is planned.

Private protectors

All agree, however, that the parkway is far from doomed.

About 180 miles of the road run through national forestland, which will never be developed.

And the Conservation Trust for North Carolina is working to preserve more of the park's most stunning landscapes. Since the group started focusing on the parkway in 1996, it has permanently protected about 30,000 acres within view of the parkway.

The N.C. General Assembly is also considering setting aside money for preservation of open space statewide, which could include land along the parkway. A study commission will present its findings this winter.

A corps of volunteers runs campgrounds, picks up litter, clears trails. A host of private groups raises money for improvements to the park. In the past few years, donations to the park have more than doubled, to about $100,000 a year.

Some say it's unrealistic to think that the federal government alone can maintain a road to standards set during the Depression -- a time when the mountains were considered too remote for much development and when the government was looking to create thousands of jobs.

"We can't expect that," said Harry Childs, a retired building official who moved to the North Carolina mountains from Florida. "Not unless we have another Depression. We had a lot of government jobs in that time."

Childs stood at an overlook a few dozen miles south of Boone. Behind him, the sun glistened on rock faces, and trees carpeted the vast rolling valley. Grandfather Mountain reclined against the clear blue sky.

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