Susan Mills admits she's baffled.

A recent meeting about the aging trail system off the Blue Ridge Parkway near Roanoke drew more than 100 enthusiastic participants to a night meeting at the Vinton Senior Citizen Center.

They were hikers, bicyclists, equestrians. And they all seemed to care passionately about the trails, which each group uses and that they apparently could have talked about all night.

But when Mills, executive director of the Friends of the Blue Ridge Parkway organization, has sought volunteers to nurse the trails -- and the parkway itself -- the pool has often been dry.

"Of the 62 trails that have been adopted along the Blue Ridge Parkway, only four are in Virginia," Mills said last week. "Zero have been adopted here in the Roanoke Valley. Yet, here we have this incredible turnout talking about trails."

So, despite her experience so far, she trusts that's a sign of good times ahead.

The prospect of harnessing that kind of passion and combining it with an envelope-pushing new superintendent for the parkway is creating a new spirit of hope for supporters of the most visited unit of the National Park Service.

Philip Francis, the 53-year-old who took over officially as superintendent in November, is already impressing longtime parkway boosters with his willingness to try new strategies for maintaining and energizing the parkway. And he's promised to bring innovative approaches to volunteer support like those that have proved a godsend to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where he was a deputy superintendent for 11 years.

According to Francis, change is coming none too soon.

He told the Vinton crowd on Jan. 26 that one in five parkway jobs is unfilled now because there's no money to pay for them. In five years, "if current trends hold true," he said, the vacancies will increase to one in three.

Despite that gloomy prospect, however, some parkway cheerleaders are more enthusiastic about the corridor's future than they have been in years.

Francis "has vision," said Richard Wells, a Roanoke publisher and president of the 7,000-member Friends organization. "He really believes in this idea of partnering."

The Blue Ridge Parkway extends 469 miles through 29 counties in Virginia and North Carolina. That presents a series of challenges that aren't faced by conventional parks.

It's more expensive to administer because staffers have to be hired at numerous locations along the parkway; it's tougher to focus supporters because they have to be drawn from such a broad region.

And, critically important from Mills' perspective, "Volunteer coordination is extremely difficult from a headquarters," which in this case is in Asheville, N.C., near the southern end of the parkway.

Because the parkway is divided into four regions, however, her group, a partner in the national Volunteers-in-Parks program, is able to publish needs based on each stretch. A recent listing in the Plateau District, from just north of Roanoke to the North Carolina line, showed a need for demonstrators at Mabry Mill, information desk assistance at Rocky Knob and trail workers at the Blue Ridge Music Center.

Last year, the Friends helped provide and organize 52,235 hours of work from 567 volunteers. That was up 14.7 percent from the year before, Mills said.

Impressive as those figures are, they're still only about half what the Smokies are now generating, according to Babette Collavo, that park's full-time coordinator of volunteers.

If Francis is able to import some of the innovations of the Smokies to the parkway, that will mean an expanded role for the Friends organization, whose primary mission now is "plantings," Wells said.

His organization, founded in 1989, focuses primarily on protecting the viewshed -- the scenic vista visible from the parkway. In November, the group planted more than 100 6-foot trees at milepost 125. That will be followed up March 25 with the planting of 300 evergreen and hardwood seedlings. (Call 772-2992 or see www.blueridgefriends.org/ for more information.)

"We don't want a green tunnel that you drive through, but in the future, being realistic, we'll have to pick spots to open up to see nice cultivated fields" in the developed regions the parkway passes through in the Roanoke Valley, Wells said.

It was three years ago this month that the national preservation organization Scenic America named 28 miles of the parkway through the Roanoke Valley as a "last-chance landscape." The encroachment of residential and commercial development has dramatically altered the views in what is the lowest and flattest stretch of the parkway.

Just a year ago, the federal government spent $800,000 to buy 20 acres of land near Cotton Hill Road -- a price that drew the ire of some preservationists, including Wells -- in a bid to help preserve the views.

But, for all the disadvantages that a linear park has, one edge comes in representation in Congress.

"We have some very influential legislators from North Carolina," Wells said, including Charles Taylor, who is chairman of the House Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on interior and environment. In Virginia, congressmen Bob Goodlatte, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, and Rick Boucher also represent the parkway's interests.

At the Vinton meeting, Goodlatte said he intends to put pressure on his fellow congressmen to understand the parkway's "unique needs," which he believes should not be met by imposing tolls on the highway.

Nevertheless, it appears that volunteers will be taking on more and more of the load for maintaining the resource, which, Wells points out, may one day involve not only planting trees, but cutting them down.

In recent years, funding shortages have reduced tree trimming schedules to every three to four years at the parkway's scenic overlooks. The result in some places is no view at all, except for the small trees growing up by the parking areas.

"Won't that be confusing?" Wells asked rhetorically.