Matt Gentry | The Roanoke Times

The community of Eggleston in Giles County is one of the older communities on the river. Now newer structures are showing up along the river.

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FOSTER FALLS -- It's a pink and white house trailer that looks as if it may have been new when the president's moniker was Ike. Guarded by a barbed wire-topped fence and tree with a "KEEP OUT" sign attached to it, this no-longer mobile home stands a short distance from the grave of John Calfee. Calfee's grave is walled and marked by an obelisk.

Both the grave and the trailer were here before the trail, which is just one of the challenges confronting New River Trail State Park, Virginia's only linear state park.

The park follows a railroad line Norfolk Southern gave the state in 1986. The first four-mile stretch of the trail -- from Shot Tower Historical State Park to Austinville -- opened the following year. Now the park stretches 57 miles -- 39 of them beside the New River.

Park manager Mark Hufeisen said his park faces the same kinds of challenges as the Blue Ridge Parkway. They're both narrow pathways that depend on their viewsheds to attract visitors, but neither has control over most of what a person can see from the park.

The challenge, Hufeisen said, is, "How do you protect the viewshed and the recreational experience while allowing the private land around it to develop?"

Though it's a state park, the New River Trail doesn't provide the river with much of a buffer from development. It's a former railroad bed after all. In most places, it's only 40 feet wide.

"The majority of the problem is we don't own all the land between the park and the river," said Jim Elliott, the park's assistant manager. "That's just a fact of how things are."

So the park has a lot of neighbors. Some of them might like to use old satellite dishes for trail-side gazebo roofs. Some of them might like to build a commercial campground that straddles the park and stretches to the river's edge.

Yogi Bear's Jellystone Park Camp-Resorts is building a campground not far from Foster Falls that will cover both sides of the New River Trail.

"They're designing an overhead crossing that looks like a railroad bridge," Hufeisen said. "I think they're actually going to turn out looking pretty good. I really do."

The trail passes through the Mount Rogers National Recreation Area, but it also passes a pair of dams and long stretches of private property. At times, being on the trail is like being in someone's front yard and someone else's back yard at the same time. In some areas, every lot that doesn't hold a house has sprouted a "For Sale" sign.

When large tracts bordering the park become available, the park likes to buy them, but that's not always an option. More often, park officials work with land trusts and other conservation groups to try to find someone willing to buy the land and put it under a conservation easement.

Such easements limit the amount and type of development. The park is looking for such a deal now for a parcel four miles south of Foster Falls.