CRABTREE MEADOWS, N.C., Milepost 340 — The Blue Ridge Parkway’s main attraction lies mostly outside its boundaries. More than anything else, parkway visitors come for the scenery.

"It’s just too beautiful up here," Jim Redmond said, standing in the Crabtree Meadows parking lot. "People say, ‘Oh, it’s a foggy day. It’s overcast.’ You look through there. I can count 19 mountain ranges through there — in the fog. It don’t get any better."

Redmond, a retired Navy SEAL, manages Leatherwood Cottages in North Carolina’s Maggie Valley. As a high school junior, he ran a jackhammer on a parkway construction crew. Now he rides a motorcycle on the parkway at least a couple of times a week.

"Most of us won’t get to heaven unless we’re up here," he said.

Much of Redmond's view was inside the Pisgah National Forest in southwestern North Carolina. One reason it stands out is that it's publicly owned, unlike 300 of the parkway’s 469 miles, which are bounded by privately owned land. What’s happening outside the parkway’s often narrow boundaries along those 300 miles is eroding the park's most important asset.

"It’s not the parkway anymore if you see development on land right up next to it," motorcyclist Todd Waterman said during a rest stop at Whetstone Ridge, near Steeles Tavern.

Milepost 126: Randy Pendleton finishes concrete with Roanoke Concrete Construction Co. on Cotton Hill Road, where they say they have helped build at least 70 houses in four years.

Stanley Abbott, the parkway’s principal designer, wanted a wide land buffer on each side of the road. That would prevent the "parasitic and unsightly border development of the hot-dog stand, the gasoline shack and the billboard," he argued.

Both Virginia and North Carolina thought Abbott's wide buffer would cost too much. Gary Johnson, the parkway’s chief landscape architect, wants to convince local governments that it will cost them even more if parkway views disappear behind development.

According to a recent survey commissioned by the National Park Service, 95 percent of the parkway’s visitors are attracted by the scenery. Another study conducted by Virginia Tech and North Carolina State University shows that visitors spent $2.3 billion across 29 counties in 1995.

"When you can say that 95 percent of the visitors come for the scenery and oh, by the way, they’re spending $2.3 billion in your counties — there’s got to be a connection there, folks," Johnson said. "Don’t think that this scenery isn’t important. Don’t think that it isn’t a product of your county."

As views deteriorate, visitors dwindle, said parkway management assistant Laura Rotegard. "It means that for every view we lose, we’re losing, on a conservative guess, 7 to 9 million visitors in Southwest Virginia," she said.

Down in North Carolina, Jim Redmond complains about "Florida scabs" — scars cut into mountains to accommodate houses, many of them built by people fleeing Florida’s stifling summer heat.

"The reason people come up here is to see the mountains," Redmond said. "If they bulldoze all the tops of them off to build houses, where are we?"

He says zoning is the answer.

Janet Scheid, Roanoke County's chief planner, used to believe that.

A year ago, the county was trying to figure out how it could protect parkway views.

"We decided a zoning ordinance isn't going to do it," she said.

There's only so much local government can force landowners to do. The parkway has even less power to control the land beyond its boundaries.

"We’re really not in a position to stop anything," Johnson said.

Instead, Scheid and Johnson have evaluated and prioritized individual views and suggested ways to preserve them. The ideas range from conservation easements, in which private landowners would voluntarily sell development rights, to buying land outright to letting trees grow to block spoiled views.

Scheid still plans to suggest zoning changes, she said, but that's no longer the heart of the plan.

If residents of communities along the parkway want to protect the park from development, they have to persuade their local governments to act, Rotegard said.

There are threats to views all along the parkway, but no area is more threatened than the Roanoke Valley.

In February, Scenic America, a national organization dedicated to protecting views and community character, designated the 28 miles of the parkway through the valley a "Last Chance Landscape." Views are deteriorating all along that section, Johnson said.

"It’s like eating an apple," he said. "You take one bite out of it and you still have a fairly intact apple. But you keep taking a bite out of it and someday you’re down to the core. . . . I guess maybe where we are in Roanoke, the apple may be pretty much gone," Johnson said.

There’s no news in Johnson’s apple analogy. People have known for a long time that parkway views in the Roanoke Valley are changing from forests and farms to subdivisions and shopping centers.

"It’s not that good people haven’t been caring for a long time," Rotegard said. "It’s just that the system isn’t working."

The system is trying to balance the rights and desires of the parkway, the people who use it and the people who support it — federal taxpayers — against the rights of private landowners.

Nicholas Beasley owns a Roanoke County farm that straddles the parkway. He’s already sold part of it to developers, who have built 300 houses near milepost 125. He wants to sell hundreds of acres more. And he doesn’t think the parkway should have anything to say about it.

"My family was here before the parkway," Beasley said. "If they want to buy it, they can buy it."

Next story: The parkway generates billions of dollars in tourism each year — and almost all of it is spent in North Carolina.