The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, already the nation's most visited, should be busier still in the coming year. A continuing rise in the number of visitors will contribute significantly to park traffic. So will a phalanx of workers engaged in a massive project to repair and update more than 50 miles of roads, a campground, and a heavily utilized trailhead parking area. The additional visitors are gratifying confirmation of the park's continuing appeal. The repairs should make a visit to the park safer and more pleasurable.

The repairs, underwritten by a combination of economic stimulus money and funds from the Federal Lands Highway Program, are welcome. They permit repair and rejuvenation of infrastructure in such dire shape that it limited access to some sites and posed dangers to visitors at others within the park. The more than $40-million enterprise will change the face of the park.

The work includes repaving the road to Clingman's Dome, the Smokies' highest peak, and the 11-mile loop around Cades Cove. Additional work will be done on the Roaring Fork motor trail, Cherokee Orchard Road, a parking lot and viewing area at the Sinks swimming site, the Meigs Creek trailhead and portions of the Foothills Parkway and Newfound Gap Road. The overall project, one park official says, is the greatest undertaking in terms of improvements in the park's 75-year history.

Even so, the 520,000-acre park, which attracts more than 9 million visitors a year, will remain in generally sad repair. Some authorities, in fact, say that even when the current projects are finished there will be a $200 million backlog in needed maintenance there. The park's extensive trail system alone, a spokesman reports, could require more than $25 million to bring up to standard.

That might seem like a lot for a single, albeit heavily visited, park, but sadly it is not. The entire national park system suffers from similar problems. One advocacy group puts the system's current maintenance backlog at $8 billion. Years of congressionally mandated shortfalls in the parks' operations budgets have created the on-going maintenance deficits and backlogs. It will take many more years of improved appropriations and other funding to overcome it.

There are signs that improvements are in the offing. Last year's appropriation for the parks included a substantial -- $100 million -- increase in operations funding. There is a similar amount included in the current budget proposal. Additional millions in stimulus funds are available as well.

All that will help narrow the distance between the money needed to keep park buildings, trails, roads and other sites and infrastructure in repair and the funding that is available to do so. It won't, however close the gap.

The current work in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and at other parks around the country is vital, but it is a short-term fix for a long-term problem. If the nation is serious about permanently reversing the decline of the parks, the public will have to demand that Congress provide sustained funding that will protect and preserve our national inheritance for the present and for generations to come.