The weekend hikers: Gail and Kurt Rheinheimer stand on top of Rice Fields, a bald southwest of Blacksburg, Va. along the Appalachian Trail. They were photographed in May by a couple who were thru-hiking the AT with their two children.

Week 85: Another part of the nearby hike-bounty for those of us living in Roanoke (when there's a wedding and a construction project bearing down on The Greatest Day Hiker Of Them All and so you can't go too far), is that you can get on the Blue Ridge Parkway just above Roanoke, drive a few miles north and build a pleasing loop hike with a little bit of parkway-paralleling Appalachian Trail built in. Creating the opportunity to do an 8-mile walk with a relaxed lunch in the middle and-- within five hours--be back home to resume the fretting and planning.

We parked at the Montvale Overlook near milepost 96 of the parkway, took the two dogs across the roadway and began descending westward on the Spec Mines Trail, blue-blazed, pleasantly switchbacked in spots and wildflower-strewn in others. The trail intersects, near the bottom of the mountainside, with Forest Road 634, dirt-and-gravel and doubling as the Glenwood Horse Trail as we took it southward. A good chance to walk side-by-side for Gail and me, but the roadside habitat--out from beneath the forest canopy--offered an abundance of flowers for her to stop and inspect. Her obsession for the day was distinguishing between false nettle and white snakeroot. And between purple-stemmed aster and daisy fleabane.

The loop turns east and back up the mountainside on FR 186, far less recently used for vehicles and thus more of a trail than a forest road. The climb here is steady but gentle, with occasional views back over your right shoulder of the ridges to the west. We paused at one point of the vista for lunch, before climbing the rest of the way to the junction with the AT just shy of the parkway at Black Horse Gap. The big trail parallels and then crosses the parkway in the mile and half back to the overlook.

That section of AT, with the parkway sometimes in view, with cars audible whenever they pass, brings to mind the offense the builders and early protectors of the trail took when the planners of the parkway (and of the Skyline Drive) announced they would parallel and/or displace the trail for well over 100 miles. These 70-some years later, though the point remains (that the trail was there first), it may well be overridden by the hope that the passage of two forest-embraced wonders along the same ridge line--both brought into being deep in the last century and deep in a more enlightened era--will serve to help protect both against the challenges of development, privatization and other physical and philosophical threats to precious public lands.

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