DEVIL’S COURTHOUSE, N.C., Milepost 422 — It doesn't look like a seat of conflict. At the dramatic rock outcrop called the Devil's Courthouse, rolling peaks of four states sprawled out under swelling thunderheads. It takes several minutes to absorb the view, and Deanna Ring was enjoying it.

It didn't bother her that her short walk here from the Blue Ridge Parkway was on a largely paved trail, sometimes hemmed by railings and marked by stern, red-lettered signs warning her to stay on the path or risk destroying rare plants.

"This is God's country, and it ought to be preserved," she pronounced with authority.

Minutes later, schoolteacher Amy Garascia made her first trip to the lookout. The red-lettered "notice closure" signs at first made her think the trail was closed. She decided they were useful, if a perhaps imperfect deterrent to some scofflaws.

"As I walked by, I wondered if other people were observing it, as I saw some toilet paper on the side of the trail," she said.

The Devil's Courthouse is a specialized ecosystem, home to endangered species such as the rock gnome lichen and an herb called the spreading avens. It is also easy to get to from the parkway and is popular with hikers.

In a very literal way, the Devil's Courthouse is where rare ecosystems and parkway visitors collide, where a hiking boot can do irreversible damage. It demonstrates one of the parkway's central environmental challenges — balancing hordes of visitors with some of the rarest mountain habitat in the Southeast.

That's especially challenging along the parkway, because the vast majority of its natural treasures are easily accessible. Parkway scientists worry that parkway lovers could trample some species right into extinction.

"You can have somebody in their Sunday high-heel shoes get to every location in this park," said Bambi Teague, the parkway's chief natural resource specialist.

The parkway is home to a dazzling array of life, from the sycamores along the lazy waters of the James River to the windswept spruce-fir forests more typical of Canada. The ground is alive with dozens of types of salamanders and rare wildflowers. The road often follows the flyway of migrating birds, and parkway land is home to trees that were standing long before the Civil War.

The stunning variety is partly because of the parkway's length; it's a 469-mile swath that ranges in elevation from 649 feet above sea level in Virginia where it crosses the James to more than 6,000 feet in the North Carolina mountains.

The parkway is also very narrow — as little as 400 feet wide in some places — and this presents problems beyond the trampling of rare plants. Forest fragmentation, invasive species and air pollution threaten a forest that visitors may like to envision as primeval.

The roadway connects what one conservation group has labeled the nation's two most polluted national parks, Shenandoah and the Great Smoky Mountains, and at the same time it's pinched tight by enemies that surround its broad flanks.

"It's a benefit and it's a disaster," said Harley Jolley, retired history professor and author of "The Blue Ridge Parkway." "But it's a reality, and it has to be dealt with."

At cross purposes
The parkway is in many ways fighting itself, struggling to maintain its rich variety of life while developing more and more amenities for the visitors, more than 22 million of them in 2002.

The parkway itself was built as a motorist's dream. That means lodges, visitor centers, parking lots, gas stations and gift shops, all in a limited area with a burgeoning visitor load.

Teague said the Park Service built its own facilities in places that would now be protected habitat. Parkway work crews planted invasive species that have harmed the native ecosystem. And officials still struggle with mowing extensive roadsides without cutting down rare plants.

Dave Catlin, a former parkway ranger and author of "A Naturalist's Blue Ridge Parkway," suggested that the parkway has an unavoidable tension between preservation and its own development.

"We took a perfectly pristine ridge and built a 469-mile highway through the center of it." Catlin said. "Even then [in the 1930s], I don't think anyone would have proposed that for the Grand Canyon.

"It's kind of hard to escape the fact that there's a lot of irony in that," he added.

But the parkway's route was not untouched when it became a park. In the accounts of original landscape architect Stanley Abbott, much of the land was eroded and logged over, a place with much less scenic quality than it has today.

"Most of it was sorry, worn-out land that had been used for years," Jolley said.

The problem of poaching
Like Devil's Courthouse, much of the rare habitat on the parkway is in North Carolina, largely because of the higher elevations. High peaks also draw visitors, so the problem of trampling isn't likely to disappear soon.

Teague said recent surveys of park visitors show that many do walk off the trail, often figuring that one pair of shoes can't possibly be a true environmental threat.

But high-elevation sites aren't the only ones threatened by easy access. For decades, the parkway has proven irresistible to poachers. They see miles of what is often deserted roadway, surrounded by valuable merchandise.

It used to be ginseng poaching, but that has declined. There are always deer poachers. Pet buffs collect and sell rare animals such as the endangered bog turtle. Others pick and sell bagfuls of galax, a ground-cover plant used in floral arrangements. Rangers can't even come close to stemming the tide of such crime.

"We know that we are just touching the tip of the iceberg," said Gordon Wissinger, the parkway's chief ranger. Wissinger estimates that rangers catch 5 percent to 10 percent of the galax poachers. They seize 25,000 to 50,000 stems of poached galax annually.

For these reasons, parkway workers don't like to disclose the location of a rare plant, even though such discoveries are happening more frequently. This summer, ranger Gene Parker helped find a healthy population of a rare plant near the Peaks of Otter. He wouldn't say what or where, fearing that would spell its doom.

For most of its history, the parkway's focus was on getting the road built. Now that there's a growing focus on natural resource protection, the parkway is undergoing its first inventory — a quest to catalog its flora and fauna that is sure to yield surprises.

"What we've not done is look at the whole park to see what's there," Teague said. "I can tell you we've got high-elevation insects that have never been named before."

Teague said that within five years the administration will have a reasonably full picture of all of the parkway's natural resources, many of which were an afterthought at best when parkway construction began.

Controlling the invaders

Milepost 158: A bog turtle moves back into his habitat after receiving a bar code by injection from Parkway biologists to help prevent poaching.

The parkway's long border makes it an easy target for invaders. Exotic plants, which often came from other continents and now overrun native systems, are one of the top threats to the parkway's rare habitats. Eradication is all but impossible in many locations. Some of the most obvious invasions are at overlooks, but those are relegated to a lower priority because other invaders are in more sensitive areas, such as mountaintops and wetlands.

The public doesn't easily rally around the control of aggressive weeds. But Teague said exotic plants can crowd out native vegetation and disrupt the area's environment by eliminating plants that wildlife depend on.

Control is all the more difficult because a seed blown in from a neighboring yard or field starts the problem all over again. Teague said that without volunteer involvement, controlling the invaders is "probably hopeless." It may mean coming to terms with new, less diverse ecosystems.

"I think we're just simply losing those habitats that define the southern Appalachians," Teague said.

The parkway focuses little on air pollution, though that directly affects what it's best known for — its stunning views. Because of regulations within the federal Clean Air Act, the parkway is not one of the "Class 1" areas that have the most muscle to limit new emissions, so the job is left largely to the national parks at both ends of the parkway. In 2002, the National Parks Conservation Association, using National Park Service data, called Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains the most polluted national parks. Parkway superintendent Dan Brown knows the problem is critical for the parkway.

"In the summer with the haze and the ozone, it's not uncommon for visitors to have their views . . . limited to six or eight miles or so, where historically a visitor might have seen 60 or 80 miles from that location on the parkway."

‘A national treasure’
Delos Monteith sat with his wife and father-in-law at an overlook near their home in Sylva, N.C., as sunset approached. His father-in-law rattled off the names of seemingly every visible ridge and told tales of rounding up hogs and hunting raccoons along them. While the elder man saw his youth on those ridges, Monteith saw a threat. He fears for the future of the parkway's jewels.

"This is a natural treasure," he said. "We need to invest in it and maintain it."

Even with unlimited investment, the parkway would face stiff challenges. The crux of the problem is that the parkway has two directives that are now butting heads — protect the environment and make it attractive and accessible to the public.

"Part of it is we don't have the answers," Teague said. "We don't know what the answers are with more and more people."

Next story: The parkway's biggest attraction is scenery — but it's also the most threatened.