The Mill Mountain Greenway has several maintenance issues in need of attention, such as storm damage to the old tollbooth and its gateway arch.

Dan Casey is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.

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It's lunchtime on a sunny Friday, but Terry Thomasson has skipped a big feed. Instead, he's slipped into a windbreaker and out the door of his Norfolk Southern office in downtown Roanoke. He's taking on Mill Mountain once again.

The lifelong Roanoker skirts icy patches along Prospect Road, aka "the old road," aka the Mill Mountain Greenway. Walking at a brisk pace, he talks about his encounters with deer, turkey and the occasional fox.

What he likes most is the midday escape into solitude -- right here in the city.

"It's unbelievable that one minute you're at your office desk, and 30 minutes later you can be climbing a mountain," he said.

Perhaps it's because he's been doing this six-mile trek almost daily for 10 years that the trim Thomasson, 57, seems to be aging well.

But the same isn't true for the gorgeous street that snakes through Mill Mountain's shadows and up to its top.

Lately, one of Roanoke's true jewels has been looking kind of shabby.

Age and neglect

Here and there, the hand-built rock wall that edges the roadway has crumbled and slid onto the asphalt.

More than a year ago, some stiff winter winds blew down a stand of trees near the mountain's bottom that smashed into the imposing stone tollgate arch and the adjacent stone tollbooth. Falling branches tore holes in the wood-shingle roofs of both. Workers removed the trees and branches, but the holes remain. So does a small pile of roofing rubble.

The road's surface is cracking in many places. As each new fissure widens, Mill Mountain regulars such as Thomasson and I grow a little more concerned.

"There's a couple of spots where they've patched it," said Paul Nagg, who lives in Northeast Roanoke and frequently rides his bike on the road. "But there's some places where, in time, if nothing's done, it'll be a landslide. You can see it separating."

Once a toll road

Prospect Road has seen far better days. When it opened as a private toll road in 1924, Roanokers hailed it as an amazing feat of engineering.

At a cost of $90,000, it was built by William P. Henritze, an industrialist and real estate investor who moved here from Welch, W.Va. He also built and occupied Rockledge mansion, which still hangs high on the mountainside facing downtown.

Prospect Road remained the only convenient way to the summit until 1971, when the extension of Walnut Avenue known as Fishburn Parkway opened.

Though still a public road that was nominally maintained by the city, the old road became little more than a driveway to Rockledge, now occupied by Drs. Kevin and Nancy Dye. Closed to traffic just past the mansion since 1989, it still serves that purpose.

The city added it to its greenway network in 2003.

Facets of a jewel

Few American cities have a mountain with a mostly traffic-free byway to the top mere minutes from the commercial center. That's one of the reasons the old road is so special. The Mill Mountain regulars can fill you in on some others.

Nagg talks about the unfriendly and loud raptor that makes its nest somewhere near the tollgate and fittingly guards that territory like a hawk.

Above the wall a little way past the third hairpin turn is the Cowboy Tree, a scrawny white pine with wide roots. It clings to slope-hugging rocks the way a cowpoke straddles a horse.

Then there's the under-and-over bridge, an engineering oddity in the Appalachians. Shiny stalagmites are budding from the asphalt road that passes below it, while threadlike stalactites hang from its ceiling.

Renewal as a greenway

Especially on warm weekends, the shady greenway is popular with families, dog walkers, runners, senior citizens and cyclists.

But beyond a few spot asphalt patches and annual leaf-clearing, little other maintenance has been performed on the old road in recent years -- even though greater numbers of people are learning to enjoy it.

Roanoke Valley Greenways Coordinator Liz Belcher is sensitive to that irony. But she's also keenly aware of the budget realities.

When a city is closing schools to save money, you can bet there's little to fix roads that hardly anyone drives on.

Belcher is hopeful that some civic-minded do-gooders will volunteer some time, money and labor, and that the Mill Mountain Greenway will shine once again.

We Mill Mountain regulars are hopeful, too.

Anybody who would like to step up can contact Belcher weekdays at 387-6060.

Dan Casey's column runs Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.