The Triangle Land Conservancy‘s newest nature preserve, the Bailey and Sarah Williamson Preserve, is now open.
The 405-acre property, at 4409 Mial Plantation Rd., Raleigh, offers nine miles of walking and biking trails that connect to the Neuse River Greenway. It’s the eighth nature preserve for the Triangle Land Conservancy, a nonprofit that works to conserve land in North Carolina’s Triangle region.
The Williamson Preserve is the first of the nonprofit’s nature preserves to include working farms on the site. Project Pando is a volunteer-driven farm that grows native trees that will be given to the public for free. The nonprofit also is working with N.C. State’s Center for Environmental Farming Systems to bring other farmers to the preserve. The goal is to give visitors a place to walk or bike and then buy fresh produce.
At the preserve, signage shares the history of the farm, which was owned by the Williamson family for more than 225 years, along with information about the Tuscarora tribe, plantation cotton and tobacco farming, Black rural land ownership and land conservation.
When you’re there, the nonprofit asks that you maintain a social distance from others and avoid overcrowding the parking lot.
Officials at Utah’s Zion National Park are grappling with unprecedented amounts of graffiti throughout the park as visitors continue to flock to the canyon.
These days, besides their normal job description of welcoming visitors, park rangers face the additional challenges of managing the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic response as well as the presence of a toxic cyanobacteria bloom in the North Fork of the Virgin River, which runs through the park.
The graffiti, which has been found along the popular Narrows hike, the Kayenta Trail and on the West Rim/Angel’s Landing Trail near Scout Lookout is something that Zion’s chief ranger Daniel Fagergren said the park has never seen at this level until this year.
“I have seen more graffiti than I have ever seen before. It’s all over, and we’re trying to get ahead of it,” he said.
The park is seeing a new type of visitor, one who may have never visited a national park before and may only be venturing out as a result of being cooped up due to the pandemic.
“They are different visitors than we normally get,” Fagergren said, adding that many of them don’t have the same affinity for pubic lands as visitors in the past.
An example of National Forest stewardship in action.
As with many mountain communities in Colorado, visitation to the Gunnison Valley is at an all-time high. Land managers observe that they have never seen our public lands as busy as they have been in recent years. The area is surrounded by 1.7 million acres of National Forest, and the Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service also manage well-known recreation areas and parks in the region.
The valley has been nicknamed “the American Serengeti” for its abundance of wildlife, the single-track trail network is among the largest in the country, and the network of waterways provide endless opportunities for summer recreation. If it sounds like the perfect place to escape during quarantine, you aren’t alone in thinking that way.
The National Forest Foundation and Gunnison County officials acted urgently this past spring to prepare for the anticipated onrush of summer visitation. The partners quickly hatched the idea for the STOR Corps – a jobs-creation program modeled in-part after the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1920’s and in-part after the youth corps model that is so successful today.
The Corps is working with all of the federal land management agencies in the county, and the work is varied and of high importance. So far, the Corps has accomplished the following: distributed vaccines to prairie dogs, cleared deadfall on Wilderness trails, installed signs on Cottonwood Pass, restored wet meadows, removed noxious weeds, and planted NFF-funded trees on Slumgullion Pass.
Have you been paying attention to social media in the Southern Appalachians region in recent days? No doubt you have seen the disturbing photographs from Max Patch, one of the iconic hiking locations along the Appalachian Trail, and in all of the South.
Max Patch, and so many others of our favorite destinations, is being overcrowded to a slow, painful death. After any summer weekend you may find hundreds of pounds of trash discarded and left behind, spoiling the scenery for those that follow. It’s laziness plain and simple. Especially out west, vandalism is on the uptick as well.
It seems the problem has become exponentially worse this year of COVID-19. Those who can’t participate in their favorite indoors activities because of closed businesses and quarantines are discovering The Great Outdoors en masse. Many of these are outdoor recreation newcomers. Perhaps it isn’t their fault. They simply haven’t been taught how to behave when in Mother Nature’s house.
One of the first things I learned, and I’m sure many of you as well, when becoming attracted to outdoors adventure was the concept of Leave No Trace.
Of the hundreds of trail reports I’ve posted on Meanderthals since its inception in 2011, I have always included this simple phrase in the author bio at the bottom of every page, “Pack it in, pack it out. Preserve the past. Respect other hikers. Let nature prevail. Leave no trace.” Pretty straightforward, right? Easily doable, right?
It’s simple in its message, easy to follow, and to the point. But it’s becoming increasingly apparent that simplicity isn’t enough. So today I am making a commitment that Meanderthals will adjust its focus from education about trails and destinations, to education about conservation and the environment. Some changes are:
Telling you how to safely get to exciting and picturesque places that you have never been so you can camp and picnic and leave 30 pounds of trash behind when your weekend is over isn’t cutting it. So I will find a better way. I will significantly curtail recommendations for hiking trails on social media, very carefully choosing any exceptions. Posting location descriptions about my photographs will stop. Don’t bother asking “where is this?” I won’t answer. Perhaps I will offer tools for route finding and map reading. It may require a little more work on your part, but in the end you will be more satisfied.
Instead, the emphasis here will be on protecting our public lands. It starts with loving our wild places the right way, through stewardship. That stewardship is explained in The Seven Principles of Leave No Trace:
Our future generations are counting on us now. These principles all work together to help leave the outdoors the way we found it. You can’t pick and choose the ones that work for you. The whole is one. If not, we end up with disasters like Max Patch.
When all the trees have been cut down,
when all the animals have been hunted,
when all the waters are polluted,
when all the air is unsafe to breathe,
only then will you discover you cannot eat money.
—Cree Prophecy
As climate change alters habitats and disrupts ecosystems, where will animals move to survive? And will human development prevent them from getting there? Now you can see those migrations in motion.
New research from The Nature Conservancy and university scientists revealed that only 41 percent of the natural land area in the United States retains enough connectivity to facilitate species tracking their preferred climate conditions as the global climate changes. As part of that study, scientists modeled the distribution and habitat needs of 2,903 vertebrate species in the Western hemisphere against land use and projected climate patterns.
Previous work mapped the geographic areas in the western hemisphere through which species will likely need to move to track their suitable climates. That study identified that the Amazon Basin, southeastern United States and southeastern Brazil are three areas with projected high densities of climate-driven movements.
In the United States, the Southern Appalachian Mountains are one of the most important migration corridors for birds, mammals, and amphibians that need to move to adapt to climate change.
NEEF’s National Public Lands Day is the nation’s largest, single-day volunteer event for public lands. Established in 1994 and held annually on the fourth Saturday in September, the event brings out thousands of volunteers to help restore and improve public lands around the country.
This year, the COVID-19 pandemic has upended many aspects of daily life in this country, and our public lands are no exception. Due to social distancing requirements remaining in place for the foreseeable future, many public lands sites will be unable to host large, in-person NPLD events. With this in mind, NEEF will be expanding the available options for volunteers during this year’s NPLD on September 26, 2020.
The theme for NPLD 2020 is “More Ways to Connect to Nature.” In addition to standard NPLD programming, this year’s celebration will include virtual events designed to connect the public to iconic parks, national forests, marine estuaries, and other public lands sites. These online events will serve as an alternative for NPLD site managers who are uncomfortable with or are not allowed to host in-person events due to local regulations.
This does not mean they abandoning in-person events. Public land sites that wish to host in-person events—in accordance with local rules and regulations regarding COVID-19—will still be able to register their event on the NEEF website.
Most people would agree: River otters are adorable. But beyond their playfulness, the otters have an important role in determining the health of a river system.
At N.C. State University, scientists this year released studies on river otters that they plan to use as baselines for future research. The first study examined the toxicological effects that metals, such as mercury, cadmium, arsenic and lead, are having on the otters.
North Carolina’s river otter populations are relatively healthy compared with populations in other areas of the United States and Canada, said Chris DePerno, a professor in N.C. State’s Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology program.
But the findings in otters don’t mean the state’s lakes, rivers and streams are pristine. North Carolina has a statewide advisory warning for consuming fish that contain mercury, as well as warnings for many water bodies with fish containing high levels of mercury, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), hexavalent chromium, dioxins and arsenic.
River otters are fierce predators that eat many creatures further down the food chain. That means heavy metals bioaccumulate and biomagnify in them. In other words, the more fish the otters eat, the more heavy metals build up in their systems.
It’s still 2020 and the pandemic-/-climate change apocalypse just got even worse.
The West Coast is burning. Residents of the San Francisco Bay Area awoke to dark orange skies, as a thick layer of smoke settled over Northern California. (Smoke scatters blue light, allowing only red and yellow to reach the ground.)
It’s hard to overstate how really, terribly bad this fire season has been. In California alone, wildfires have blown through 2.5 million acres of land since the beginning of the year — about 10 times more than last year, and much more than 2018’s previous record of 1.8 million acres.
Meanwhile, in Washington state, fires erupted over Labor Day weekend, scorching 330,000 acres in just 24 hours. The smoke led cities across the West Coast to warn their residents to stay inside and keep windows closed to avoid breathing some of the dirtiest air in the world.
One of the reasons, of course, is climate change. High temperatures dry out vegetation and the surrounding air, making wildfires more likely to burn fast and hard. The fire season has also lengthened. What was once a four-month season has stretched to six or even eight months in some regions of the U.S., according to the Forest Service.
Conservation Trust for North Carolina recently donated three properties totaling 123 acres to the National Park Service for addition to the Blue Ridge Parkway. The land, made up of three tracts, contains a significant section of Woodfin Creek upstream of the Woodfin Cascades, between Parkway mileposts 446 and 450 in Jackson County. Each of the tracts adjoin other properties protected by CTNC that will also be donated to NPS for inclusion in the Blue Ridge Parkway.
All of the land is highly visible from Waterrock Knob and is part of a growing area of protected public land around Waterrock Knob near Cherokee and the southern terminus of the Parkway. Waterrock Knob and the surrounding region attracts millions of visitors each year due to its natural beauty and unique heritage. The partnership with the National Park Service, local communities, and other land conservation organizations ensures all these qualities will endure for generations.
The Mountains-to-Sea Trail, which hikers can access directly off the Parkway at Woodfin Cascades Overlook, hugs the boundary of two of the tracts. The third property rises to 6,000-feet elevation and hosts a healthy population of native spruce.
Conservation Trust originally purchased these properties in 2013.
CTNC has already donated four others in the immediate area, and owns three more adjoining properties that will also be donated to the National Park Service. These transactions are part of a collaborative effort to bolster the area’s resilience to climate change, protect water quality in the Little Tennessee River basin, and strengthen the local economy by expanding tourism and outdoor recreation opportunities.
When you stand on a ridge or mountaintop in Western North Carolina, maybe from Wayah Bald in the Nantahala National Forest or Waterrock Knob on the Blue Ridge Parkway, it might look like miles of rippling green and blue mountains.
But what you’re really looking at is a checkerboard, said Carl Silverstein, executive director of the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy, an Asheville-based nonprofit land trust. Visualize these forests as black and white boxes of public lands and private lands, he said.
And blending them into a beautiful, sustainable, cohesive landscape is more like a high-stakes game of chess, or Monopoly – making the right move at the right time with the right amount and source of money.
The movers, shakers and money-makers were able to pull off a win in two recent deals. This summer the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy purchased two parcels totaling 219 acres that will eventually be added to the Nantahala National Forest and open to the public.
One of the tracts contains Big Creek, a headwater tributary of the Chattooga National Wild and Scenic River. The other is located on Tanasee Ridge and can potentially provide an alternate gateway to Panthertown Valley, a popular area for outdoor recreation. Both have long been priorities for addition to the Nantahala National Forest.
Trish Jennings watched customers dining 6 feet apart outside her Bit & Spur Restaurant and Saloon on an evening in mid-August, missing the usual gregarious chatter of outdoor adventures.
Springdale, a small southwest Utah town sits just outside the gates of Zion National Park, and most of the restaurant’s customers arrived after a day exploring the park’s 2,000-foot-deep canyon. Jennings, 53, and her staff are accustomed to swapping hiking and camping stories with thousands of visitors every summer from all over the world, often forging new friendships.
For many residents like Jennings, those daily exchanges were essential to the town’s spirit, often making it seem bigger than a community of 660 people. But the COVID-19 pandemic — along with Springdale’s new social distancing measures and mask requirement — have given the easygoing, sociable town a subdued feeling this summer.
While tourists have steadily returned since the park reopened on May 13, there are still fewer than usual — 449,518 recreational visitors in July, down from 629,802 the same time last year, with few, if any, coming from outside the country — and the conversations in restaurants, shops and motels are shorter and more transactional. Many of the town’s elderly residents are staying home, avoiding the crowds at the park.
Subaru of America, Inc., the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), and National Park Foundation (NPF) announced that through an innovative partnership three of America’s most iconic national parks are at the forefront to reduce the amount of waste that parks send to landfills.
As part of the multi-year Don’t Feed the Landfills Initiative led by NPCA, Subaru of America Inc., NPF, and park concessionaires, Denali, Grand Teton and Yosemite national parks have made incredible progress to shrink the environmental footprint in and around these parks.
Since the launch of the initiative in 2015, the three pilot parks have made significant strides by keeping more than 16 million pounds of waste out of landfills. Last year alone, through increased recycling and composting efforts, the pilot parks cut their landfill waste by nearly half.
With, on average, 330 million visitors each year, the National Park Service (NPS) manages nearly 70 million pounds of waste nationally, which would fill nearly 600 dump trucks. Subaru has extensive experience in understanding waste diversion to landfills, as the first automotive assembly plant in America to achieve zero-landfill status in 2004.
Because of this, Subaru has committed to sharing its knowledge of zero-landfill practices by working with NPCA, NPF and NPS, toward a goal of significantly reducing the amount of waste that national parks send to the landfills.
The U.S. Forest Service released a proposal that would fast-track fracking and drilling across the country’s 192 million acres of national forests and grasslands.
The proposed rule would reduce requirements that the Forest Service approve oil and gas leasing plans, sidestep National Environmental Policy Act review, and prevent public involvement before the public lands are leased out for fossil-fuel extraction.
“This proposal would basically make the Forest Service a rubber stamp for the fossil fuel industry,” said Michael Saul, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We face accelerating climate change, fire and drought, and the last thing we should be doing is making it easier to auction off our irreplaceable national forests for destructive drilling and fracking.”
The Forest Service proposal undermines a key requirement that it have the last word on national leasing decisions, conflicting with its congressional mandate.
The agency says the proposed rule would align its leasing methods with the Bureau of Land Management’s, but the BLM’s methods have been struck down by a federal court because they prevent public input.
At age 4, Virginia Ward could identify every tree in the woods near her home.
By age 12, Ward was rappelling off the highest cliffs in Western North Carolina, helping Blue Ridge Parkway plant ecologist Dr. Chris Ulrey in his important work to study rare plants.
Now 15, Ward, a sophomore at Nesbitt Discovery Academy who lives in Fairview, has won the prestigious 2019 Youth Award as part of the George and Helen Hartzog Awards for Outstanding Volunteer Service, an annual recognition of volunteer excellence in the National Park Service.
Ward was the only youth to receive the award. Considering there are 419 national parks in the country with some 279,000 volunteers, this was no small feat.
The parkway – the second most visited national park site in the country – had 1,380 volunteers last year.
Ward has spent the past three summers scouring mountains, armed with a clipboard and heavy climbing gear, along with Ulrey and sometimes some other interns or volunteers.
Cairns are rock stacks that can serve as critical trail markers, and some carry cultural significance, as well. Others are purely decorative, built by visitors who enjoy designing these towers in nature, often for the sake of sharing images of delicately balanced stones on social media. Besides the fact that it violates the Leave No Trace program’s ethos that should be honored by visitors to our national parks and other public lands, here’s why you should resist the urge to create a rock pile, during a pandemic or otherwise.
Trail designers put a lot of thought into where and how they place way-marking cairns to safely keep people on the path. But rock stacks erected by trail users may have the opposite effect. If a hiker ventures off-trail and builds cairns to mark their own route, that could lead others astray from the actual route, and perhaps into danger.
Heading off-trail, and leaving unofficial cairns that lead others to follow you, doesn’t just endanger humans; it can put local plants, insects, animals and more at risk as well. In the case of removing rocks from rivers and other water bodies, you may be disrupting aquatic habitats.
Arbitrarily building these types of rock piles with no regard for official or cultural purposes or environmental issues is “almost like graffiti.” It announces, “I was here,” just without the spray paint.
A Conservation Corps North Carolina (CCNC) crew of young adults worked with volunteers from the North Carolina High Peaks Trail Association to complete high priority trail work on the Black Mountain Crest Trail in the Nantahala National Forest.
The CCNC crew consisted of five 18 to 24 year-old AmeriCorps Members led by a trained Crew Leader. The crew worked on the Black Mountain Crest Trail project August 3-12, 2020. Together, crew members and volunteers completed 7.3 miles of trail maintenance from the base of Celo Knob at Bolen’s Creek to Deep Gap. The group constructed large drains to reduce erosion and cleared the corridor with brush cutters to make the trail more accessible for hikers. The CCNC crew camped in the backcountry near the project site the entire time they worked.
The Black Mountain Crest Trail project was one of several projects the CCNC crew worked on for the United States Forest Service (USFS.) The crew worked for seven weeks doing trail construction and maintenance for the USFS in the Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests. Their other projects in the National Forest included completing three miles of trail maintenance on the Sassafras Creek and Snowbird Creek trails in the Cheoah District and removing 62 fallen trees while doing trail maintenance on Shinbone Ridge in the Tusquitee District.
Conservation Corps North Carolina is a program of Conservation Legacy, a national program that supports CCNC and other local programs across the nation. Conservation Corps program are a legacy of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and engage youth and young adults on high priority conservation projects that protect ecosystems and restore, improve, and protect North Carolina’s public lands and outdoor recreation resources.
“These young adults worked incredibly hard, often amid all kinds of weather conditions, to restore and improve trails in the Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests so they are sustainable and offer visitors a more safe, welcoming, and enjoyable hiking experience,” said Jan Pender, CCNC Program Manager.
“The CCNC crew was able to complete trail maintenance that simply never would have gotten done by our staff or dedicated volunteers of NC High Peaks alone,” said Michael Good, United States Forest Service Appalachian District Fire Management Officer. “They contributed hundreds of hours of work clearing the trail of debris and installing features to reduce trail erosion. We are grateful to everyone involved for making this work possible.”
“CCNC has been a remarkable opportunity for me to work one last time in the wilds before I head out into the business world” said CCNC Crew Member Peter Chege, of Raleigh, NC and a recent college graduate. This was Peter’s second stint with CCNC. “The first time around helped pay for my college, but now I just want to enjoy these mountains, which remind me so much of my native home of Kenya.”
The CCNC crew members included crew leader Luke Knight of Erie, PA; Alysha Pennachio of Boone, NC; Drew Edelson of Charlotte, NC; Chase Perren of Oxford, NC; Travis Bosler of Spirit Lake, IA; and Peter Chege of Raleigh, NC.
A huge thanks from Meanderthals to them all.
Years of unchecked logging laid waste to two-thirds of Costa Rica’s tree canopy, leaving its tropical rainforests facing an uncertain future. But the trees have returned and the resurrected forests support a thriving eco-tourism industry.
Towards the middle of the 20th century, indigenous woodland – predominantly tropical rainforest – covered all but a quarter of the country. But then the loggers arrived. The forests were cleared as crews of lumberjacks freely converted Costa Rica’s natural resources into profits.
By the early 1980s, the destruction of two-thirds of the forests had ravaged the habitats of indigenous creatures. Following decades of decline, an unusual thing happened. The rate of deforestation slowed and eventually dropped to zero, and over time the trees began to return.
What caused this dramatic reversal of fortune? The simple answer is that Costa Rica began to realize the potential of its rich ecosystems and set about safeguarding them. Policy-makers restricted the number of logging permits and created a national forestry commission to police forest activity.
How Costa Rica doubled the size of its rainforest in just a generation – reversing environmental destruction, helping nature and wildlife, benefitting people's wellbeing, tackling #climatechange, and creating jobs too 🌳pic.twitter.com/e9nTOui594
— Green Adventures (@GreenTravelMag) August 22, 2020
As a way to celebrate the 104th birthday of America’s National Parks System, parks will be open to the public free of charge on August 25, 2020.
On Aug. 25, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Organic Act, establishing the National Park Service as a bureau in the Department of the Interior responsible for maintaining national parks and monuments.
Today, the NPS manages 419 of what they call “units,” which includes parks, monuments, battlefields, memorials, lake shores, historic sites and more.
According to the National Park Service, the fee-free days are designed to give everyone access to their public lands.
The entrance fee waiver for fee-free days does not cover amenity or user fees for activities such as camping, boat launches, transportation or special tours in any of the national parks or other park service sites.
Other fee-free days in 2020:
Sept. 26: National Public Lands Day
Nov. 11: Veterans Day
I am Jeff Clark, founder of Internet Brothers, producer of this blog, and passionate about hiking. I live in Western NC near the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains. Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests are just out my door, so the content will focus on these areas, but let me know what you would like to see on the site. 
Copyright © 2011-2023 Internet Brothers. All Rights Reserved. ISSN 2324-6057
Designed by Elegant Themes | Powered by Wordpress | Logo by Design Aspirations
