This coverage is made possible through a partnership between BPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
Coming up a remote mountain in the Nantahala National Forest, there’s a surprising sound that breaks through the din of birds and cicadas: jackhammers. In the middle of a Forest Service-maintained road deep in the woods, a construction crew sits in a deep pit, measuring and building a massive structure. But Thomas Hawkins, a trout conservationist, said it’s all to protect the fish.
“This is where the culvert will be, right here,” said Hawkins, pointing to the muddy pit where the construction crew was hard at work.
The stream that flows through this area has been rerouted around the project, the fish captured and re-acclimated a little downstream. The stream will be set free once the project is done, and it will flow through the culvert, which will be about 18 feet wide, and funnel the stream under the road that winds up the mountain.
The native Appalachian brook trout has lost almost half of its habitat in the Southeast. Increased storms and heat have also challenged the fish. Here in Western North Carolina, Helene destroyed even more of their high-mountain stream habitat, scouring away the rocks they love to hide beneath. But some trout scientists are working on a solution to help these ancient, iridescently colored fish — which have resided in Appalachia since the Ice Age — survive the Anthropocene, the word some scientists are using to describe our current geological era of significant human impact.
Hawkins manages North Carolina projects at Trout Unlimited, a nonprofit that works nationally to conserve wild trout and salmon. These culverts are a big part of his work, alongside his colleagues Benjamin Bradley, an engineer, and Jacob Rash, the organization’s southern Appalachian program director.
Together the three of them walked upstream, down the road and across the other culverts built in previous years. They’re about 16-18 feet wide, and time has done its work: some are hidden by brush, barely visible in a dense thicket of woods.
Bradley stepped through tall grass to get down to one of the culverts crossing the water. He climbed into it, sitting by the stream. It looked normal, flowing over rocks and cobble.
But it takes a lot of construction to get to this natural-seeming state. They have to temporarily reroute the stream, help save its fish, then restore the rocks and soil on the creek bottom.
“It probably takes about two years to do the whole engineering design, the whole permitting process, to find a contractor, get the construction going and get it built,” Bradley said.
So why go through all this effort?
As our natural spaces have become crisscrossed with roads, more dirt and pollution gets into streams. Small or poorly designed culverts can also cause wood pileups, leading to flooding. Restoring the creek bottom also slows down floodwater, breaking up momentum with rocks.
So the strategy is to let the two bypass each other.
“We like to kind of let the road be the road, stream be the stream, and they don't really know either one is there, and we're not having those two systems interact a whole lot,” Bradley said.
According to Rash, this shade is massively important for the little fish. Brook trout need cold, clean, oxygen rich water. As the climate warms and human development spreads, these cold, high mountain streams are getting warmer too.
“If you can fix the habitat, you give the fish a chance,” Rash said.
As the three walked back past the bucolic stream and back towards the construction site, the jackhammers started up again — but in a few years, it’ll be another peaceful stream as humans and trout travel their occasionally intersecting paths.
