Retired park ranger hiking 469-mile Blue Ridge Parkway

Among the many motorcycles, cars, trucks and a few bicycles these days on the Blue Ridge Parkway is a 56-year-old hiker with a bright green hat and a bumper sticker on his pack.

David Barlow’s hike from one end of the parkway to the other is a bit of a coda in a life filled with stories about running into burning buildings as a firefighter, running avalanche-strewn marathons in the Colorado wilderness and, perhaps most dangerously, teaching for 33 years.

Early in his career of adventure, however, Barlow started working as an interpretive ranger for the National Park Service on the parkway during the summers of 1974 through 1977.

“Some people get to be my age and they have to have a sports car,” the Landis, N.C., man said. “For me, this is a chance to get to see all the places north of where I worked that I would tell people about.

“I can poke my feet in the streams and actually walk in all these areas. It’s a very different experience than whizzing by in a car. It’s a religious experience of sorts. In a way, it’s like coming home.”

He isn’t the first person to hike the 469-mile parkway — or the second or third, according to his friend Tim Pegram.

Pegram, a retired ranger who walked the parkway in 2003, and wrote “The Blue Ridge Parkway by Foot: A Park Ranger’s Memoir,” worked with Barlow during his early years in the park service. Pegram is widely believed to have been the first person to have walked the parkway.

Since then, others have done it, he said, but no one has walked the length of the original parkway, which used to extend into part of what now is Skyline Drive.

“I told him, why don’t you make your walk just a little more unique than mine, start at Jarman Gap?” he said.

Until 1961, Barlow said, the southernmost 8.5 miles of Skyline Drive were part of the Blue Ridge Parkway. That’s where he started his hike on Aug. 30.

So far, he has hiked between 10 and 15 miles each day. He plans to reach the parkway’s southern end in North Carolina in mid-October.

He hikes mostly on the edge of the road facing traffic, though he sometimes moves to the opposite side to get a better view of oncoming traffic coming around some of the parkway’s tight curves. Sometimes he walks on the grassy shoulder to give his feet a break.

Traffic has not been a problem, he said. With his red and white hiking stick, a reflective vest wrapped around a 40-pound pack and that fluorescent hat, he estimates he can be seen from two miles away.

Most people wave as they go by; drivers a high wave and motorcyclists the low wave Barlow calls “low love.”

“The worst are the people that get right up beside you and blow the horn,” he said.

Before dark each day, he leaves the roadway to find a secluded campsite. His setup isn’t much: just some waterproof sheeting used in homebuilding, a sleeping bag and a mosquito net to keep the bugs off while he sleeps.

Although the Blue Ridge Parkway may be the National Park Service’s most-visited unit, parkway officials caution those who might think of following in Barlow’s and Pegram’s footsteps.

The parkway’s chief of interpretation and education, Ann Childress, said it is legal to walk the parkway, but officials have safety concerns.

“The road was designed for vehicle traffic, to include motorcycles and bicycles,” Childress said. “It was not designed as a pedestrian walkway.”

Camping is also a concern, she said. Backcountry camping is allowed in areas where the parkway goes through national forests. Outside of that, she said, camping along the parkway must be done in designated camping areas that are often much more than a day’s hike apart from one another.

Pegram said parkway officials should address the camping issue since bicyclists often have the same problems reaching designated camping areas. And, while bicyclists are more accepted by parkway officials, “a pedestrian can step off the road when a car comes. A bicyclist can’t.”

Heading up Apple Orchard Mountain in Bedford County on Friday, which means walking from the parkway’s lowest elevation to its highest in the course of a day, Barlow said he felt good and that his equipment was holding up.

“It looks like I’m going to finish this thing,” he said.

His goal was to make a gathering of former and current parkway employees today at the Peaks of Otter, where he said he looked forward to a reunion with Pegram and their former supervisor, Harley Jolley.

Jolley is among those to whom Barlow has dedicated his hike.

Jolley worked on the parkway as a Civilian Conservation Corps employee during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Barlow said it’s especially meaningful to dedicate the hike to Jolley since 2008 is the 75th anniversary of the corps’ foundation.

“The parkway is his,” Barlow said.

The hike is also dedicated to longtime Peaks of Otter supervisory ranger Gene Parker, who died Aug. 16, Barlow said.

And then there’s the Operation Christmas Child bumper sticker, or man sticker as it may be.

Barlow is also hiking to raise awareness for the international Christian missionary project to bring gift-filled shoeboxes to children in need.

Just south of mile marker 69 on the mountain slope Friday morning, he said finishing the trek, expected some time in October, will mean more than completing a daunting task.

“I will have put my foot in every overlook,” he said. “If I do that, then the parkway is mine.”

And, he added, “just 400 miles to go.”