Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 13, 1994 TAG: 9403130042
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: E-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"How can anything east of the Rockies be as beautiful as this?" she asked.
In her book, "Bike-Tripping Coast to Coast," Notdurft-Hopkins called the Catawba route the "perfect road."
She had pedaled enough of them to know when her narrow tires were humming across something very special. Starting on the coast of Oregon, she traced the Bikecentennial Trail to Jamestown in 1976, the year the route was inaugurated as the longest continuous bicycle trail in the world.
More bikers come to Catawba nowadays, following the perfect route with its backdrop of mountains, its green meadows, its Black Angus cows gazing curiously through rusting fence wire, its weathered barns, its deer grazing near the irregular shoulder.
The hard, biting saddle of a 10-speed would be the best seat in the house for this blending of scenery and solitude, were it not for those nearby sky boxes called Dragon's Tooth and McAfee Knob.
The tooth and knob are 500-million-year-old upheavals of Silurian sandstone along the fabled Appalachian Trail, where hikers by the hundreds pause to gaze from lofty perches. In the distance, barns look like match boxes, hay fields appear the size of postage stamps, streams are a stroke of an artist's brush and one blue mountain folds into another as far as the eye can see.
So there was raw shock a few days ago when a map was circulated showing a bright yellow band streaking through the valley, like a snake stretched out in the Garden of Eden. It wasn't so much a proposed route for Interstate 73 as it was a declaration of war.
Dr. Bill Gordge, the land management supervisor for the Roanoke Appalachian Trail Club, saw the proposed interstate as "utterly destroying the remote and rural character of the trail and the Catawba Valley."
It would treat the Bikecentennial Trail and the designated Scenic Byway it follows even harsher.
And that wasn't all. The route on the map leaped from the Catawba Creek drainage to send its yellow shaft through the heart of the Havens Wildlife Management Area, a 7,000-acre chunk of remote bear habitat owned by the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.
Even if Gen. Sherman had tried, it would have been difficult to plan more damage for the scenic, historical, recreational and wildlife resources of this delightful region.
It now appears the Catawba route is well down on VDOT's ranking of potential I-73 corridors, but Gordge, a Roanoke pediatrician, told a packed house at the Catawba Community Center last week that now is not the time to grow complacent.
"I don't think there is any grounds for assurance," he said, as if telling a mother her child is recovering, but the fever could return.
What is certain is the fact that people can band together and testify at hearings, attend meetings, write letters by the hundreds and make phone calls, and when they do they can make remarkable progress toward saving a national treasure.
For those of us who love Catawba and own property there, that is the most lasting message from the interstate scare.
You win battles, but the war waged to save the best of what is left never is over. As long as there are green valleys, there also will be predators stalking open space in the name of economic development.
That's something to ponder next time you relax on the coarse fang of Dragon's Tooth.
by CNB