The Parkway is numbered, not signposted
An All-American Road with 204 surfaced overlooks, a 152-mile span of numbered pull-offs, and one four-hour loop out of Asheville that never leaves the ridge.
Most roads tell you where you are with a town. The Blue Ridge Parkway tells you with a number. It runs as an All-American Road through North Carolina and Virginia, and the overlooks along it are not named after the view — they are named after the milepost they stand at.
Byway has surfaced 204 overlooks on the Parkway. Seventy-three of them carry their milepost inside their own name: Raven Fork Overlook MP 467.9. Ballhoot Scar Overlook MP 467.4. Thomas Divide Overlook MP 463.9. Big Witch Overlook MP 461.9. Jenkins Ridge Overlook MP 460.8. Bunches Bald Overlook MP 459.5. Lickstone Overlook MP 458.9. They run in sequence, and a driver reading them knows how far along the road they are without a single town name.
The numbered overlooks span MP 315.6 to MP 467.9 — a hundred and fifty-two miles of road where every pull-off knows its own address.
What the numbers are for
A milepost is not decoration. It is the only address the Parkway has. There are no cross streets to turn at and, for long stretches, no towns to pass through — so a milepost is how you say where you stopped, where you are meeting someone, and how far there is left to go. Learn to read them and the road stops being an undifferentiated ribbon and becomes a sequence you can hold in your head.
The other 131 overlooks Byway has surfaced take the older approach and name the thing you are looking at: Oconaluftee River Overlook. Mile High Overlook. Maggie Valley Overlook. Lake Junaluska Overlook. Waterrock Knob Viewpoint. Balsam Gap Overlook. Both naming habits sit on the same road, sometimes within a mile of each other.
Four hours out of Asheville, all of it on the ridge
Asheville sits against the Parkway, which is why the shortest loop the engine bakes from it barely leaves high ground. Eighty-two miles, seven stops, three hours and fifty-four minutes including the time spent standing at each one.
- Hemphill Knob
- Kitsuma Peak
- McDowell Tourism Authority
- Bluerock Mountain
- Rattlesnake Knob Observation Point
- Tater Knob
- Ferguson Peak
Six of the seven are knobs, peaks and a named rock. That is not a theme anybody chose; it is what is reachable from Asheville inside four hours when the road you are on runs along the top of a ridge. The loop also touches Black Mountain Rag and Drovers Road, two more signed byways that cross the same country.
Give it eight hours instead and the shape changes completely. Two hundred and four miles, eleven stops, and the list stops being summits: Linville Caverns, Greater Foscoe Mining Company, Foggy Mountain Gem Mine, Blowing Rock, Arrowhead Monument. Twice the time buys you the valley floor, not more ridge.
What the road runs through
Measured against the committed park and public-land boundaries, the Parkway corridor runs within reach of Great Smoky Mountains and Shenandoah, and of the national forests along it — George Washington and Jefferson, the National Forests in North Carolina, Cherokee, Francis Marion and Sumter, Chattahoochee-Oconee. Seven units of public land on one road.
It is one of 55 scenic routes Byway has mapped in North Carolina, and 73 of its overlooks tell you where they are before they tell you what they see.
The song
Volume 006 of the byway series is Until The Ridges Go Blue, written for this road. The ridges do go blue, one behind the next, and the reason the overlooks are numbered rather than named is that after a while there is no other way to tell them apart.