Photos by Sam Dean | The Roanoke Times

Mac McDaniel (center), 74, and other volunteers finish trail work Wednesday at the Read Mountain Preserve.

Mac McDaniel looks off Buzzards Rock. Roanoke County worked out a $1-a-year lease to allow access to the rocky view.

Bill Gordge (left), 80, and Malcom Black, 87, are members of a volunteer team, with an average age of 75, that has been working on Read Mountain since January.

Last week, members of the "Wednesday work group" -- a team of volunteer trail builders with Pathfinders for Greenways -- completed a new two-mile path up Read Mountain to an outcrop known as Buzzards Rock.

They were ready, they thought, for today's formal dedication and opening of the Read Mountain Preserve, the latest addition to Roanoke County's park system.

But on Sunday, Bill Gordge and other work group members decided they weren't quite satisfied with a short stretch at the top where they had used an existing route that dated to the Great Depression and the Civilian Conservation Corps.

"We got to thinking it's still not up to the quality we'd like, so we're going to go back to see if we can't finish it," Gordge said Monday.

When the county's greenway planner, Janet Scheid, heard the news, she chuckled. "I'm not surprised. Bill is a perfectionist."

That meant on Wednesday morning, Gordge, 80, and his team whose dozen members average about 75 years old were back on top of the 2,350-foot mountain.

By the time their work was done, the team had topped 1,300 hours of labor on the trail since beginning work in January.

Although plans call for a series of trails through the 250-acre preserve, the path to Buzzards Rock is considered the centerpiece of the park and epitomizes the public-private partnerships necessary to get greenways built.

"The neat thing about this project," Scheid said, "is that the land was given to us, we have a beautiful trail donated by Bill and the work crew, we've had three or four Eagle Scout projects that erected a kiosk, an ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] path, and guardrails.

"We built the parking lot with matching funds through Ron Crawford's group, the Read Mountain Alliance," she said.

The county and the Roanoke Valley Greenway Commission had been working for years to get the owners of Read Mountain, one of the most prominent geological features of the Roanoke Valley, to place it under conservation easements to protect it from development.

The effort paid off first in November 2006 when Fralin & Waldron Inc. donated 153 acres on the southeast side of the mountain, protected by a conservation easement, to the county. The next November, Al and Beth Durham donated an adjacent 90 acres, also protected from development.

As the county, Pathfinders -- a nonprofit volunteer group supporting the greenway commission -- and Gordge's group began planning the trail, they realized they had two problem spots.

The first was fixed when F&W Development Corp. donated three-quarters of an acre on the northeastern edge of the site to allow trail construction.

The second was how to get hikers not just to the ridgeline -- the county's property extends that high -- but to Buzzards Rock, the outcrop offering the most spectacular views. In a report to the board of supervisors earlier this month, Scheid said, "it became apparent that a trail that stopped at the county boundary -- short of Buzzards Rock -- would be somewhat anticlimactic."

So, the county began negotiating with the Ida Mae Holland Trust, which owns the rocky point just north of the county property, and reached an agreement for an annually renewable $1-a-year lease to allow access to the site.

Gordge, a retired pediatrician who has been building and repairing trails throughout Southwest Virginia for 30 years, called his group's latest one "a very nice trail. A little bit of a challenge, but it quickly gets into a wild natural environment."

Glimpses of the valley below are somewhat limited during the steady climb up, he said, "but it's a nice view when you get to the rocks."

"It's not a big mature forest because the soils are not good up there," he said, but the mixed hardwoods make the site "very nice, very remote but close to civilization."

About 190,000 people live within 10 miles of the mountain, he said.

That access makes the new park "a wonderful resource for the entire valley," Scheid said, which eventually will be tied to the valleywide greenway system.

On the Net: www.vast-network.org www.roanokecountyva.gov