From the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Swannanoa River plummets down the steep forested slopes of the Asheville Watershed into the Burnett Reservoir as the hulking summit of Mount Mitchell looms overhead. The views are spectacular.

But Parkway visitors have little chance to stop and enjoy them. Signs posted along the road on the Asheville Watershed’s perimeter strictly forbid drivers to stop on the shoulder. Their cars and even their footprints, it seems, could sully the main source of drinking water for western North Carolina’s largest city.

Now the Asheville City Council is considering a forest management plan that calls for logging in the Watershed. Could that mean bringing earth-churning heavy machinery into much closer proximity to drinking water sources than any Parkway tourist ever could?

David Hanks, Asheville’s interim water resources director, says no.

“We’re not proposing massive cutting,” Hanks says. “If anything what we’re wanting to do is maintain the water quality by just getting rid of some of the dead trees.” (Hanks sent the plan, which was prepared by a private forestry management consulting firm, to the City Council in June.)

But water quality isn’t the only reason the plan cites for timber harvesting.

The decision to develop the plan in the first place came after a 2002 plane crash near Black Mountain, N.C. Local rescue crews said overgrown roads in the Asheville Watershed made reaching the wreckage difficult. They said they’d face similar problems if a forest fire ever broke out. Logging, according to the plan, could improve access in case of emergencies.

That explanation doesn’t satisfy some environmentalists. Logging would actually increase fire danger and the spread of invasive plant species, while degrading water quality for the region, they argue.

Longtime community activist Monroe Gilmour, who enjoys views of the Asheville Watershed from his home in Black Mountain, calls the plan a “Trojan horse for commercial logging.” In a letter to the city council, Gilmour claims that the absence of revenue projections from logging and the specific acreages of planned timber harvests make it impossible to gauge the forestry management plan’s real impact on water quality and scenic views, especially from the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Hanks counters that a conservation easement on the Asheville Watershed land already prohibits logging on much of the property. Besides, he says, some 90 percent of the Watershed land boasts grades of 35 percent or steeper. That, combined with a lack of a well-maintained infrastructure of roads, would make a massive timber harvesting operation difficult, says Hanks.

Still, at least one City Council member says the plan leaves too many questions unanswered.

Councilman Brownie Newman, former executive director of the grassroots environmental group Western North Carolina Alliance, supports the parts of the plan that call for the removal of invasive species and closing crumbling roads that are sending sediment into streams. But he shares concerns over the plan’s real intent.

“The management plan needs to be more clear about which direction it’s really going in,” Newman says. “Are we really talking about opening up the majority of the watershed property and putting it into a 60-year logging rotation? “ If that’s the case, he says, the plan should be more honest about its underlying rationale. Gilmour agrees.

“It is all about trying ‘to raise money,” Gilmour says. “If they would simply say that, then we could have an honest discussion about it.”

-Marcus Wohlsen