U.S. Forest Service must study alternatives for the route of a private easement to the Laurel Creek Property Owners’ inholding at the rim of the Valley River Mountains
‘We must make a commitment to protect the special places’ – Austin D.J. Gerken
By Tom Bennett
Special to Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition
Murphy, N.C., Oct 10, 2013 — There’s a fabulous massif 1,896 miles long stretching from Newfoundland to Alabama, averaging 100 to 300 miles in width and covering and/or impacting 736,887 square miles of the eastern seaboard. This is the Appalachian Mountains.
They drain much of the Earth’s water – a finite thing – into fragile lace patterns of streams, rivers and lakes in valleys, many of which remain verdant. If you ask me, these waterways themselves and their aesthetic quality constitute as significant an environmental resource as there is to be found anywhere on the Earth.
Here at roughly the southern center of the Appalachians, there’s been a significant development in a six-year-old issue testing U.S. environmental law. I refer to the voluminous portions of it that have to do with tracts of land surrounded entirely by national forests and lands and called inholdings.
Eight western North Carolina couples, led by a former county manager of Clay County, make up the unincorporated Laurel Creek Property Owners Association. It formed last decade when its members acquired a 1935 tract of 50 acres at the rim of the Valley River Mountains. This remote and mysterious crest is the dividing line of Cherokee and Clay counties at the far western tip of North Carolina, at its border with Tennessee. Those 41 acres in the private hands of shrewd and informed private citizens are deep inside the Nantahala National Forest.
Amid pristine remoteness, the acres there once belonged to a tannery in Andrews, N.C. It made saddles and had crews up there cutting and hauling out branches of hemlock trees. They did this rim-scalding because that type of tree and its branch were judged best at busting off the hide of cattle in whirling vats of water that were the heart of any tannery. Somehow the tree farm of the powerful family then making horse saddles skirted condemnation by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) in 1920 when the Nantahala National Forest was created by Congress.
IT IS NOT THE BEST NEWS for the Laurel Creek Property Owners that the young Asheville environmental attorney Austin D.J. Gerken, who does not mince words in correspondence, has taken a lead role in the health of the western N.C. portion of the Appalachians.
Gerken’s recent brief on behalf of the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) plus the Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition, Wilderness Society, Wild South and Western North Carolina Alliance, commences a new chapter in this inholding issue in the Valley River Mountains.
The USFS ruled with Gerken et al and states that Nantahala National Forest must “consider alternative routes outside of a sensitive watershed to access a private development surrounded by Forest Service land in the Fires Creek watershed,” according to an SELC announcement.
This turns on its head a controversial June 2013 finding by Kristin Bail, supervisor of N.C. National Forests, that a proposed easement up Phillips Ridge by the Laurel Creek group, at its own expense and with its own equipment, would not have any significant impact on the watershed.
“We must make a commitment to protect the special places in our region,” Gerken said. “The Fires Creek watershed is a unique place and we shouldn’t carve a roadway through it without considering reasonable and affordable alternatives.”
“The water quality and aquatic habitat of streams in the Fires Creek watershed are exceptionally high,” said Callie Moore of the Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition. “We’re hopeful that with further consideration the Forest Service will choose a route of access that safeguards this special area.”
I’ve written earlier how this mountain crest tracks along the Cherokee-Clay county line. Alternative paths to the eight couples’ inholding that lie on the western slope in Cherokee County are themselves no bargain as far as longtime environmental protection goes. But unlike the steep old rutted log trail along Phillips Ridge in Clay County, they lie well away from streams.
IN APRIL 2008, the property owners applied for an easement with papers signed by Michael Anderson. In November 2011, his and the group’s consultant, Fish & Wildlife Associates, did an environmental assessment. In March 2012, USFS Southern Region in Atlanta complied with a freedom of information request and provided a journalist 516 pages of correspondence between on the one hand Anderson and the consultant, and on the other hand the USFS Tusquittee Ranger District office here in Murphy.
In December 2012, USFS did its own environmental assessment. In June 2013, Bail issued her eye-catching FONSI. I’m not referring to a character on “Happy Days.” I mean a finding of no significant impact.
The data at the beginning of this work wherein I have the Appalachians’ length, average width and extent of impact in square miles is from Wikipedia and the mountain climbers’ site www.peakbagger.com.
Laurel Creek is a tributary of Rockhouse Creek which is a tributary of Fires Creek, itself a tributary of the Hiwassee River that begins in north Georgia and traverses these western N.C. counties to eventually receive the Ocoee in Hinton, Tenn. The water in the Hiwassee continues to the Tennessee, Ohio and Mississippi rivers, finally reaching the Gulf of Mexico. Experts say this does not take long at all, and so harm to water quality anywhere along the line can be significant.
Tom Bennett of the Martins Creek community near Murphy, N.C., was a retired newsman, Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition member/volunteer/donor and recipient of the 2015 Holman Water Quality Stewardship Award. Tom died on December 28, 2020.