Pictured above: Deconstruction of the Ward’s Mill Dam near Boone, North Carolina. See more photos in the blog gallery below. 

By Andy Hill, Watauga Riverkeeper and MountainTrue High Country Regional Director

In a huge win for local aquatic wildlife, the Ward’s Mill Dam has finally been removed! The dam removal process was a three-year effort that was well worth the wait. Working in partnership with American Rivers, Blue Ridge Resource Conservation and Development, Watauga County Soil and Water Conservation District, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service, this $1.2 million project reconnected 35 miles of aquatic habitat in the main stem of the Watauga River and 140 miles of streams across the watershed. Now, populations of native fish species — like the tangerine darter — and threatened salamanders — like the hellbender — are reunited and will benefit from an improved cold-water habitat.

Located just a few miles from Boone, North Carolina, the dam was originally constructed in 1890 and underwent some structural improvements over the years. The mill complex served the surrounding community for generations by providing electricity, jobs, firewood, and building materials. However, the dam had been an obstacle for local aquatic wildlife for the past 130 years. The dam removal was a high priority for experts and biologists and was considered to be a top priority project by both the Southeast Aquatic Resource Partnership and the North Carolina Aquatic Barrier Assessment Tool.

Dam deconstruction began in May 2021 and was performed by Wildlands Engineering and the Aquatic Restoration team from the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Fish Passage Program. Project funding was generously provided by the North Carolina Division of Water Resources, Patagonia, the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, Beech Mountain Resort, Hunter Banks of Asheville, and Boone’s Fly Shop.

MountainTrue’s Watauga Riverkeeper, Andy Hill, is excited about the environmental benefits of the dam removal and the opportunity to create more recreational opportunities by connecting the Watauga River Paddle Trail to the section of the Watauga once occupied by the Ward’s Mill Dam. “We’ve greatly improved aquatic habitat and river health,” says Hill, “and we’ll continue to promote safe river recreation while honoring the historical and community cultural value of the Ward Mill.”

The Ward family continues their generations-long environmental stewardship by removing this aquatic barrier and graciously surrendering their hydropower license with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. While the instream dam structure has been completely removed down to bedrock to reconnect the watershed and allow for sediment transport downstream, the iconic sawmill, historic buildings, and complex have been preserved in partnership with the State Historic Preservation Office. Please respect the decision and the privacy of the Ward family at this time.

“We are excited to see the long-term environmental benefits associated with removing the dam, but are also excited about preserving the rich history of the dam complex by documenting and saving the nearby historic buildings,” explains Jonathan Hartsell of Blue Ridge Resource Conservation and Development. “This complex project has been successful from start to finish due to a well thought out gameplan from the project management team, agency partners, and most importantly, the landowners.”

The complex project required careful execution to maintain the delicate biodiversity of the Watauga River and its streams. Dr. Mike Gangloff and Dr. Derek Martin of Appalachian State University led a team of researchers to collect valuable aquatic habitat data before and after the dam removal. The research team conducted sediment flow research, aquatic habitat surveys, and numerous nocturnal scuba dives to search for the elusive nocturnal hellbender salamander. The team’s sediment flow research and aquatic habitat surveys will better inform future dam removal projects and contribute to the field of knowledge for river restoration.

While they offer benefits in certain circumstances, dams can also significantly damage rivers. Dams increase water temperature, reduce river flows, lessen the amount of dissolved oxygen required by fish, amphibians, and other aquatic species, and block the natural flow of sediment and debris. Dams also serve as physical barriers for river recreationalists such as paddlers and anglers, as well as aquatic wildlife. Additionally, most dams require frequent maintenance, and many require removal or rebuilding after 50 years.

“Rivers are like a circulatory system, and thanks to this dam removal, American Rivers and our partners celebrate a free-flowing Watauga River, which is the lifeblood of a thriving community, healthy ecosystems, and clean water for people and nature,” says Erin McCombs, American Rivers Science Program Director and Southeast Conservation Director.

Just over one-year post-removal, life has returned to this section of the Watauga River in a major way. Over 5,000 live stakes and 600 pounds of wildflower seed have been planted in the riparian zone along the river banks. These plantings will help shade the stream, prevent erosion, filter stormwater runoff, and create new aquatic habitats. Life has also returned under the river’s surface, with post-removal surveys showing a rise in both numbers and diversity of macroinvertebrates and fish species such as tangerine darters and war paint shiners. Juvenile hellbenders and hellbender eggs have also been discovered well upstream of the removal site for the first time in many years! 

“We’re encouraged by this progress and the increased biodiversity that is returning to this stretch of the Watauga River,” says Watauga Riverkeeper Andy Hill. “We’re forever grateful MountainTrue members because their support enables us to accomplish transformational watershed projects such as this.” 

Gallery photos: Nighttime deconstruction of the Ward’s Mill Dam; Watauga Riverkeeper Andy Hill and colleague stand in front of the mill; Andy Hill searches for hellbenders below the dam site; an excavator clears debris from the Watauga River.  

After over 30 years of wrangling, the I-26 Connector project is finally slated to begin construction in 2023.

By Chris Joyell, MountainTrue Healthy Communities Director

The current I-26 design will look much different than what was originally proposed, thanks to the work of the MountainTrue and the Asheville Design Center. When the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) first proposed the Connector Project in 1989, it sparked widespread concern among Asheville residents living within its path. Typical of NCDOT projects at the time, the project catered to thru-traffic drivers and not to the needs of the people and neighborhoods of Asheville itself. If left unchallenged, it would have been overbuilt and threatened communities already harmed by previous highway projects.

In 2000, the community started organizing in earnest to oppose the plan. MountainTrue (then the Western North Carolina Alliance) co-chaired the Community Coordinating Committee (CCC), which issued a report recommending nine key design goals that the final project should achieve. These included separation of local and interstate traffic, matching the scale of the project to the character of community, reunification and connectivity of community, and minimization of neighborhood and local business impacts. These goals have continued to be the foundation for advocacy by residents and the City of Asheville ever since.

Pictured above: An Asheville Design Center-led I-26 design charette held in the MountainTrue office in 2006. 

Then in 2006, the Asheville section of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) secured grant funding to form the Asheville Design Center. This allowed the Center to begin holding community meetings, workshops, and design charrettes to create a community-authored design for I-26 that met the CCC’s goals. Eventually called Alternative 4B, this design was finished in 2007 and received broad community support, including funding from the City of Asheville and Buncombe County for an engineering study to prove that it was feasible.

In 2009, NCDOT committed to including a revised version of the community-designed Alternative 4B in the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) – the first time anywhere in the country that a community-developed design became a viable alternative for a major highway project. Also in 2009, a coalition of representatives from the Asheville neighborhoods that stood to be most impacted by the new highway – including West Asheville, Burton Street, WECAN, Emma, and Montford – formed the I-26 ConnectUs Project. MountainTrue served as the convener and coordinator, using its expertise to amplify neighborhood concerns with NCDOT. The ConnectUs Project also adopted the CCC report’s goals as the basis for its advocacy.

In 2013, the I-26 Working Group came together and was made up of elected City and County officials, a representative of the business community, and MountainTrue as a representative of the ConnectUs Project. The Working Group secured consensus on several important issues, including that NCDOT should analyze the possibility of having fewer lanes through West Asheville and honor the City’s vision for the Jeff Bowen Bridge to become an urban boulevard. This effort also resulted in NCDOT committing to build a multi-use path from Haywood Road in West Asheville to and across the Bowen Bridge – a significant victory for community connectivity.

When NCDOT issued a revised Draft EIS in 2015, Asheville City Council passed a resolution in support of the community’s vision and formed a working group with NCDOT to hammer out the remaining issues. In 2016, NCDOT selected Alt. 4B as the preferred alternative for the project and, in 2017, NCDOT agreed that the highway in West Asheville would be six rather than eight lanes. That same year, the Asheville Design Center merged with MountainTrue, sharpening the organization’s focus on the built environment.

More recently, MountainTrue has worked to ensure that the land between Clingman Avenue and the Bowen Bridge — currently owned by NCDOT — gets returned to the city for redevelopment. Our aim is to extend Patton Avenue all the way to the Bowen Bridge, providing infill opportunities that can address our housing shortage, while also connecting downtown to the French Broad River and the Wilma Dykeman Riverway. In addition, we can realize new north-south connections between the Montford and WECAN neighborhoods, and provide the Hillcrest Apartments with a direct connection to Patton Avenue transit options.

Good transportation planning considers a community’s unique context and engages residents from the beginning. It should protect our most vulnerable neighborhoods, ecologically sensitive areas, and mountain views while minimizing the impacts on homes, businesses, and special community assets. Good transportation planning can improve quality of life, increase transportation options, make our communities healthier, and reduce pollution.  

In the coming years, we will see how these principles play out on the ground, and we will continue to advocate for an I-26 Connector that serves the people who live in, work in, and visit our city.

Pictured above: WNCA members collected more than 15,000 petition signatures to stop the practice of clearcutting in Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests. When all the petition pages were taped together, they were the length of three football fields.

By Bob Gale, MountainTrue Ecologist and Public Lands Director

In 1976, Congress passed the National Forest Management Act (NFMA) requiring the U.S. Forest Service to produce management plans for all national forests. The combined force of the NFMA and the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960 required the agency to adopt a multi-focus management approach that equally prioritized timber production, water, wildlife, and recreation in our national forests. 

Issued in 1987, the first Nantahala-Pisgah Management Plan was considered by many to simply be a 50-year blueprint for logging. Prior to the oil and gas drilling threat, the Forest Service had been ramping up timber sales in national forests around the U.S. The logging was occurring at an unstainable rate and it was employing the most damaging method of logging — clearcutting. This clearcutting was causing extensive damage to Western North Carolina’s (WNC) forest ecosystems. From erosion on mountain slopes to the severe sedimentation of streams and rivers, as well as the negative impacts on native plant and wildlife communities, this clearcutting harmfully manipulated and altered thriving forest stands throughout Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests. Clearcutting also allowed for the Forest Service’s repeated entry into the stands to thin the resulting overcrowded and unhealthy trees with more cutting and/or herbicides.

The rampant and highly visible clearcutting that was taking place all over the WNC mountains angered the public. The passion and organizing capacity of WNC Alliance (WNCA) members channeled the wider public’s outcry into an effective, people-powered grassroots campaign, which gained the Forest Service’s attention and ultimately brought an end to clearcutting.

WNCA founders Esther Cunningham and David Liden enlisted the help of the organization’s Forest Management Task Force (FMTF) to address the clearcutting issue. The FMTF was comprised of an elite group of forest-savvy members from all over WNC and it received major credibility and inspiration from Walton Smith, a retired and well-respected Forest Service silviculturist. Smith and another retired forester and FMTF member, Bob Padgett, strongly believed that clearcutting — or even-aged management, as it was euphemistically known in the profession — was damaging mountain forest ecosystems. They also believed that more sustainable timber harvesting methods existed. Smith, Padgett, and another clearcutting critic and WNCA supporter, Clemson Emeritus Forestry Professor Bob Zahner, gave WNCA tremendous credibility on this issue. The FMTF cleverly attached the title, Cut The Clearcutting, to their crusade. FMTF members provided energy for the region-wide effort, which included local appeals, protests, letter-writing campaigns, and other activities.

Smith led WNCA members through timber sale stands to demonstrate how clearcutting was causing harm and explain how sustainable forestry should be accomplished. He re-designed the famous Biltmore Stick used to measure the potential value of a timber stand by adding other important measurements and renaming it the WalDee Stick — a combination of his own name and that of his wife, Dee. Smith taught WNCA members how to gather on-the-ground data by using the WalDee Stick, which the organization then used to document errors in Forest Service’s timber sale proposals. He also demonstrated how the agency’s removal of the diverse hardwood species in rich coves left them vulnerable to a tulip tree monoculture that suppressed oaks and other native species. 

Pictured above: MountainTrue’s Public Lands Field Biologist, Josh Kelly, counts the rings on a tree in Nantahala National Forest.

As Esther, David, and early WNCA members were wrestling with this problem, a young activist named Monroe Gilmour was fighting to protect an ill-thought-out proposal to begin logging in the Asheville Watershed — the source of the pristine drinking water supply for the city and its surrounding communities. Gilmour knew the water supply would be severely impacted if the forest canopy protecting the drainage system’s soils and headwaters were cleared. 

Gilmour rallied local concerned citizens and founded a group named Citizens Against Clearcutting the Asheville Watershed, with its jeering acronym “CACAW.” His campaign was successful in raising public concern and opposition to the proposal. Gilmour’s efforts ultimately led to the prohibition of logging in the watershed’s higher elevations through the creation of a conservation easement held by the city and the Conservation Trust of North Carolina.

Impressed with this success, WNCA hired Gilmour to help run its new Cut The Clearcutting campaign. He coordinated the diverse parts, including developing a schedule of events, getting the campaign covered in the media, printing petitions, and collecting signatures throughout WNC counties. A peak of the campaign occurred with a well-organized demonstration in Asheville involving a variety of knowledgeable speakers. The petitions were securely taped together by members of the Unity of the Blue Ridge Church in Henderson County and combined onto a giant roll. Another roll of petitions was compiled from businesses across the mountain counties. 

The collective expertise and action by WNCA’s members got the attention of the Forest Service Supervisor and after countless meetings over several years with the agency, the agency’s management plan for Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests was significantly amended in 1994. WNCA was influential in getting clearcutting dropped as a harvesting method, establishing buffers from logging within stream corridors, and designating protected old-growth tracts within timber management areas. These protections were innovative and the Nantahala-Pisgah National Forest Management Plan became a national model. 

Thanks to the hard work of WNCA founders, staff, forestry experts, and volunteers, the organization successfully went to bat (and hit a home run) for the continued wellbeing of Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests in its early years. And that work continues today as our Public Lands Team remains dedicated to the protection of these two beloved national forests through sound, science-backed management that perpetuates the unique biodiversity and honors the cultural and spiritual importance of these ancient mountain forests. 

MountainTrue: an organization born in the forest, rooted in the mountains, and strengthened by our communities. 

By Bob Gale, MountainTrue Ecologist and Public Lands Director

The year was 1982. Esther Cunningham — a retired school teacher from a rural area of Macon County known as the Carson Community — first heard rumors of a plan by major oil companies to build roads and drill test wells across Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests in search of oil deposits. The plan was being proposed by the U.S. Forest Service in the form of leases to the big oil companies at a ridiculously cheap price. Esther undertook extensive research into the proposal and unearthed the surprisingly massive scale of the drilling plans. She also discovered that one of the major lessors behind the proposal’s corporate shield was, in fact, the government of Kuwait. So, Esther sounded the alarm within her extensive network comprised of many folks in North Carolina’s far western counties. 

Esther chaired the Carson Community Club and she and her husband, Jim, were active in other community clubs across the mountain counties that were part of the Western North Carolina (WNC) Associated Communities. Because of their work with Associated Communities, the Cunninghams had been invited to a regional meeting of the Appalachian Alliance (AA), a multi-state network of community clubs, and it was here that Esther met Bill Horton, AA’s Executive Director. 

Horton was presenting on the AA sponsorship of a six-state project called the Appalachian Land Ownership Study. When Esther told him about the oil and gas leasing threat, he put her in touch with former AA staff member, David Liden, who had dealt with this issue in West Virginia but recently moved to his wife’s family area of Cherokee County, NC. It was a serendipitous meeting — David helped Esther develop a grassroots campaign to educate WNC residents about the oil leasing plans and the naivete of the Forest Service offices regarding the source of the proposal and its potential impacts on our mountain forests. Together, Esther and David decided to formally establish a nonprofit organization to address this threat and they named it the Western North Carolina Alliance (WNCA). 

The WNCA founders gave a lot of thought to their branding of the organization. David notes that they avoided characterizing themselves as an environmental organization because of the distortion, ambiguity, and divisiveness inherent in that label at the time. Instead, Esther and David wanted to engage and activate fellow WNC locals, so they brought a variety of community members together to collaboratively define the issues that were important to them. This early focus on community participation and outreach to a diverse public proved to be an innovative and astonishing formula for success. 

They developed WNCA’s membership model, which grew to include folks of all ages from local families that went back generations, as well as transplanted newcomers from around the country. Hunters, anglers, university professors, retired Forest Service foresters, community club leaders, craftspeople and artists, school teachers, real estate professionals, and farmers joined WNCA and added to its capacity as a membership organization by representing many different interest areas. 

This broad coalition with local roots was a new phenomenon for this region and gave WNCA unique credibility. It also confused the Forest Service, as the agency had not expected such united opposition to their plans in Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests. Under Esther and David’s leadership, the fledgling nonprofit and its devoted members created a powerful grassroots force that halted the oil leasing proposal in its tracks. 

In their initial attempt to protect this region’s natural ecosystems, WNCA’s founders achieved the organization’s first success and set the stage for its evolution into MountainTrue. 40 years later, MountainTrue continues to champion resilient forests, including Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests.