In 2008, I wrote about the Parkway’s impending 75th anniversary for National Parks Traveler.

Here, I reflected on a symposium on Parkway history that I helped organize for the celebration:

Titled A Living Past on a Borrowed Landscape: The Blue Ridge Parkway at 75, our symposium aimed to focus on the struggles this park faces as a narrow corridor threaded through a populated region. The scenic views that are key to the Parkway traveler’s experience stretch from the NPS-owned lands to the horizon, and maintaining the Parkway’s magic always entails ongoing negotiations with those from whom the views are, in a sense, “borrowed.”

I discussed my hope that the 75th anniversary celebrations would allow us to draw lessons from the past that would help us face the Parkway’s greatest challenges in the future.

You can read the post over on NPT here.

Or review a locally-stored PDF here.