Harold Graham and Paul Crock rode their motorcycles roughly 1,200 miles from Indiana so they could ride on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

"We’ve heard from a lot of other people across the country that this Blue Ridge Parkway is just fantastic to ride on a motorcycle," Graham said.

"Yeah," Crock said. "And they’re right, too."

Tod Waterman could tell them all about it. For each of the past five years, he has ridden a motorcycle from his home in Baltimore to his sister’s house in Hickory, N.C. He’s on the parkway most of the trip.

"This time of year, there’s not much traffic," Waterman said during a break at Whetstone Ridge, near Steeles Tavern, on a rainy spring day. "There’s lots of curves. There’s no trucks. There’s no lights. There’s a lot of wild turkey though. It’s just a great place."

A surge in motorcycle riding is one of the most dramatic shifts in the past few years in how the parkway is used.

While most car travelers take to the parkway for the scenery, many motorcyclists do it for the thrill of taking curves at high speed.

"A lot of people head down to Deels Gap," Waterman said. "It’s like 300 curves in 11 miles. There’s a motorcycle campground and restaurant at the end of the run.

"They pretty regularly are winching bikes out of the canyons."

Gordon Wissinger, the parkway's chief ranger, said speeding motorcycle riders have become a prime complaint of other visitors.

"Probably few complaints we get are more common than that," Wissinger said.

Wissinger said recent years have also seen a disproportionate increase in motorcycle accidents. They have increased 43 percent since 1997, while parkway visitation climbed 8 percent over the same period.

Though it's chiefly a "motor road," the parkway has also seen a recent upswing in bicycling. That has not brought a swell of accidents, Wissinger said. But big bicycling events such as the Assault on Mount Mitchell, which attracts 750 participants, don't sit well with many of the non-biking parkway travelers, who must negotiate miles of curvy road lined with exhausted riders.

"It's not a particularly good experience for most of them," Wissinger said.

More and more people are blurring the definition of motor road by using the forests alongside the parkway for recreation.

For example, the parkway in North Carolina is already a popular starting point for hikers sampling the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, which traverses parkway land.

North of Roanoke, the Appalachian Trail meanders near the parkway, crossing it eight times before settling in beside the road for the last five miles or so to Rockfish Gap.

In the Roanoke Valley, trail advocates are working to build trails in the woods along the parkway that connect to downtown Roanoke, the Roanoke River Greenway, Explore Park and neighborhoods.

Horseback riding has long been popular on wooded, unofficial parkway trails around Roanoke, and horseback riding near the parkway has stayed roughly stable in popularity, Wissinger said.

Some activities along the parkway, such as camping, are declining in popularity. Many of the campgrounds used to fill up routinely, but now only one or two regularly reach capacity, Wissinger said.

The reasons are unclear, but Wissinger thinks many campers want more amenities than the decades-old parkway campgrounds offer. Those old campgrounds don't have showers or electric hookups. Their campsites also tend to be smaller than in newer areas.

Likewise, parkway picnic grounds used to be crowded. Now, many stay empty for long stretches, apparently because of a cultural shift away from picnics as a family pastime, Wissinger said.

Among other things, the parkway's first General Management Plan, which is being developed now, will map how the parkway administration will balance the varied and sometimes competing uses of the park.