Influx of Fall Tourists Leaves Rangers Depleted

For the millions of visitors who travel the Blue Ridge Parkway each fall, it’s a season of changing leaves and wondrous color.

For the national park’s 30 rangers, it’s a time of stress and long hours.

With a budget that has tightened in recent years, the National Park Service has been forced to patrol the parkway with fewer park rangers and equipment that is outdated or failing.

“Each year it costs us more money to do the same thing we did the year before,” said Blue Ridge Parkway Chief Ranger Gordon Wissinger.

The Blue Ridge Parkway stretches 469 miles from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to the Great Smoky Mountains in Cherokee, N.C. Nearly 20 million people visit the parkway each year, including about 3 million in October who come to see the leaves change.

There are 30 rangers patrolling the parkway, which is just four more than in the 1950s when the number of visitors was 15% what it is today.

In the Parkway’s Pigsah District, budget constraints have led to the loss of three full-time law enforcement positions, leaving nine rangers to patrol the 165 miles from Grandfather Mountain to Cherokee 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The tightening budget has also led to a failing radio system, patrol cars’ logging well over 100,000 miles and large amounts of overtime.

The entire parkway has an annual operating budget of $13 million, with about $4 million going to the ranger division, according to Joe Aull, parkway administrative officer. The ranger division must divide the money among resource management, interpretation and law enforcement.

“We’ve not got any word if there will be any additional funding,” said Parkway Supt. Dan Brown. “We recognize we have a need for additional staffing.”

The number of rangers at Blue Ridge Parkway has been depleted even further this year. Three rangers from the Virginia section were sent to New York and Washington to assist with rescue and stress debriefing after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Many of the rangers joined the park service to protect natural resources, but they spend most of their time responding to a wide variety of complaints, ranging from wildfires and lost hikers to assault and even murder.

After Great Smoky Mountains ranger Joe Kolodski was slain on the parkway in 1998, measures for rangers’ personal safety were heightened. There is more focus on tactical training and self-protection, and all rangers are required to wear bulletproof vests while on duty.

“This is one of the few professions in the world where a person comes to work every day and puts on a [bulletproof] vest to keep them alive,” Wissinger said. “It brings the point home that it’s a job like no other job.”