The North Fork is Clearly Wild and Scenic, Advocates Say, So Make It Official

The Transylvania Natural Resources Council is pushing to make the North Fork of the French Broad a National Wild and Scenic River, permanently protecting it from damming.

Rapids on the North Fork of the French Broad River pictured last week

ROSMAN — After descending the quarter-mile trail from US 215 to the North Fork of the French Broad River last week, I found deep forest, a granite-walled gorge and — with the river running too high for fly fishing and too low for kayaking — total solitude.

Putting aside the presence of the lightly traveled highway to the east and the tiny community of Balsam Grove a few miles to the north, most people would probably call this stretch of the North Fork wild.

And with a thundering flow of water plunging between bankside rhododendrons and over car-sized boulders, it definitely qualifies as scenic.

But those are general terms, and the question now facing politicians from Transylvania County Commissioners to federal lawmakers is whether this designation should be official. More precisely: Should the North Fork be added to the select list of only four National Wild and Scenic Rivers in Western North Carolina?

The Transylvania Natural Resources Council thinks so, and in October, the group’s chair, Owen Carson, presented information to the Commission with the long-term aim of securing its backing of this status for a 3.2-mile stretch of the river in Pisgah National Forest north of Rosman.

The American Whitewater paddling and conservation organization has long pushed for its designation and, in the Nantahala Pisgah Land Management Plan adopted earlier this year, the US Forest Service included the North Fork on a list of “eligible” Wild and Scenic Rivers.

It would be up to the US Congress to codify this status, an action that would impose no restrictions on fishing in the river or hunting or timber harvests in the surrounding gorge, Carson said. Nor would it stop development of private property upstream or downstream from the Forest.

Mostly, he said, it would just protect the river from ever being dammed.

Non-committal commissioners posed, among other questions, whether the designation would draw crowds of tourists and whether, considering the federal control of that stretch of the river, more restrictions are really needed.

And a board member of the county’s Soil and Water Conservation District, citing the long-term threat of flooding, called a permanent ban on damming the North Fork “nearsighted.”

Or, considering the river’s environmental and recreational value, just the opposite.

Though there are currently no plans to dam the North Fork, advocates of the designation cited past efforts as proof that the free-flowing status of the river could someday be threatened. And a future dam would destroy the qualities that make it a cherished destination for anglers and kayakers and flood a pristine ecosystem that Carson called a “Transylvania treasure.”

“To those of you who haven’t experienced it,” he said, “it’s a rugged, wild, wonderful gorge, with a beautiful free-flowing river.”

The River

Paddler descending Box Car Falls on the North Fork. (Photo by Kellis Kincaid)

The North Fork forms in the Great Balsam Mountains, just below Devil’s Courthouse, and gathers volume as it flows south through Pisgah and then private land in Balsam Grove.

Residents there have long been “good stewards” of the river, said David Whitmire, a Natural Resources Council member and co-owner of Headwaters Outfitters on the banks of the North Fork. And when the river returns to Forest land south of the community, the river remains clear enough that he compared it to Wilson Creek near Grandfather Mountain, which is already a Wild and Scenic River.

The 3.2-mile stretch of the North Fork eligible for that status begins shortly after it reenters the Forest and offers “world class trout fishing,” Carson said, as well as prime habitat for the giant hellbender salamander, whose numbers have shrunk dramatically due to sediment and other impurities in Appalachian streams.

“We probably have the highest hellbender population that I know of in Western North Carolina within a mile of my shop,” Whitmire said, “and that’s the canary in the coal mine as far as a litmus test for water quality.”

For serious paddlers, this stretch of the North Fork is considered an “intermediate/advanced” river, with one Class 5 rapid, a passage on Boxcar Falls called Blind Date, and many smaller, still-thrilling drops with names like Submarine and Vortex, said Harrison Metzger, 62, a long-time advocate for the river’s protection.

Paddlers are drawn not only by these challenges, but to wintertime sights of the gorge’s cliffs looming behind bare trees, and, in spring, river banks blanketed with wildflowers.

“It’s just so beautiful and fun and accessible,” said Metzger, a Henderson County writer who began running the North Fork with Whitmire in the 1990s. “I just fell in love with the place.”

Despite its beauty, Metzger and others said, the Wild and Scenic designation is unlikely to make the North Fork a magnet for big crowds of visitors — a concern raised by Commissioner Larry Chapman.

It attracts only “avid and adventurous” anglers willing to walk into the gorge and wade in fast-flowing water, Carson said. When the river is low enough for them, it is too low for paddlers who require high-flow conditions that typically occur only a few dozen times a year, Metzger said.

Its main destination for hikers, Boxcar Falls, can be reached by an unmarked trail on the bed of a former logging railroad, Kevin Adams writes in his definitive guidebook, North Carolina Waterfalls. But the best vantage point offers only a partial view of the Falls, he writes, and requires crossing a ford that is knee deep “even in low water.”

“In high water,” his description of the hike concludes, “forget it.”

Wild and Scenic

Some level of accessibility, however, would be needed for its eventual naming as a Wild and Scenic River, said Kristen Sikorsky, assistant recreation director of the Forest’s Pisgah Ranger District.

The 1968 law creating the designation was designed to protect free-flowing rivers that “possess outstandingly remarkable” values such as scenery, habitat and recreational opportunities.

Beyond that, the law created varying standards for qualification. These range from requirements covering truly “wild” rivers that “represent vestiges of primitive America” to “recreational” streams such as the North Fork that are “readily accessible by road or railroad (and) may have some development along their shorelines.”

 “As far as ‘recreational’ goes,” Sikorsky said, the North Fork “hits every checkbox.”

Early drafts of the forest plan left it off the list of eligible rivers, but it was named along with 18 other Pisgah and Nantahala streams in the final document released in February.

Though other nearby waterways, including the Whitewater and Thompson rivers, also made the list, only the North Fork lies entirely within the county.

That clinched the Council’s efforts to join American Whitewater’s advocacy for its designation, Carson told commissioners, adding that David Casey, the ranger of the Pisgah Ranger District “has been on board with us from the get-go.”

“We decided to focus locally,” Carson said, “and put all our efforts into the North Fork of the French Broad.”

These efforts, he said, included meetings in the spring with residents in both Balsam Grove and Brevard, where Council members explained the limited impact of the designation and found “overwhelming public support.”

The naming of North Fork as a candidate for Wild and Scenic status also  committed the Forest Service to managing the river to maintain this eligibility, Sikorsky said.

That means it won’t allow dams or other water “impoundments,” or block access for hiking, kayaking and fishing, she said.

“We can’t do anything to tread on those recreational uses.”

The Threat of Floods

Image of flooding near Balsam Grove caused by 2021’s Tropical Depression Fred. (Screenshot from YouTube footage posted by meteorologist Reed Timmer.)

If the Forest Service already exercises such control, Commissioner Teresa McCall asked, why is the Wild and Scenic designation needed?

Mostly to permanently ban damming, Carson said, which is exactly what concerns Bob Twomey, an elected board member of the county’s Soil and Water Conservation District.

In his previous role as a district conservationist with the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service, he was in the thick of the most recent major push to dam the North Fork.

In the mid-1980s, the Transylvania County Commission asked the Service to produce a plan to reduce the threat of floods from major storms, which led to a proposal to build six dams on tributaries of the French Broad.

The planned 56-foot-high structure on the North Fork would have created a 53-acre reservoir, according to a two-part story published in September by Carolina Public Press and, like the five other dams, it came with an estimated cost of between $16 and $18 million.

Though the county would have been required to pay for maintenance, most of the construction costs would have been covered by the federal government, Twomey wrote in an email.

The North Fork dam “could have prevented downstream flood damages and even supplied gravity water supplies well into the twenty-second century,” Twomey wrote.

Facing well-organized opposition from environmental groups, the Commission voted to abandon the project in 1993. Considering that the county regularly receives heavy rains and is occasionally inundated by major storms — most recently Tropical Depression Fred in 2021 — Twomey called this decision “truly a lost opportunity for a multiple-use structure.”

 “Be careful what you ask for, especially if it’s permanent,” he wrote of the ban that would come with the Wild and Scenic designation, “because one day local future needs and uses may no longer be an option.”

The “Big Dam Era”

That plan to dam the North Fork came long after most of the major river  impoundments were built in the United States, from the mid-1930s to the end of the 1960s. And an earlier, never-realized effort to build structures on 14 tributaries of the French Broad — proposed by the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1966 — came at the tail end of this so-called Big Dam Era.

Is it poised for a revival as the warming climate threatens to fuel devastating floods and propels the drive to capture the renewable energy potential of hydropower?

Not, at least, in the near future.

A 2016 report from the US Department of Energy touted the opportunity for a nearly 50 percent increase in national hydroelectric output by 2050. But it also forecast this boom would be realized not by building new dams but by upgrading or retrofitting existing structures — an approach that was the focus of the $2.3 billion dedicated to hydropower in the 2021 federal infrastructure law.

And any plans to dam the North Fork would face the same challenges that brought an end to the era in the first place — high costs and the prospect of environmental destruction, said Kevin Colburn, national stewardship director for American Whitewater and a Buncombe County resident.

Damming the river for hydropower would likely cost many times the estimate from 30 years ago, he said, and in recent years the economic viability of hydropower has slipped behind that of alternative energy sources such as wind and solar.

The most cost-effective method of limiting damage from future storms would be a bolstering of the county’s inadequate Flood Damage Protection Ordinance, Carson said. And a dam primarily designed for that purpose would not only be “catastrophically expensive,” Colburn said, it would need to be kept partially empty to reserve capacity, limiting its use for recreation or energy generation.

“It would be really big and would have few other values because it would have to be kept empty,” he said.

It would also devastate the environmental and recreational values that justified North Fork’s eligibility for Wild and Scenic designation.

Upstream from the dam, the river bed would lie under a lake. Downstream, a stretch of it could be left dry and barren by the conduits often used for hydroelectric generation. And wherever the flow returned, it would emerge warmer and less conducive to supporting native aquatic species.

Dams “interrupt sediment flow, interrupt fish from going up and down stream . . . and they change water quality and water temperature to the negative,” he said. “The whole ecosystem would be obliterated.”

Which, regionally, has happened far more often than preservation.

“Western North Carolina has over 400 dams and only four Wild and Scenic Rivers, and there is supposed to be a balance between dammed rivers and protected rivers,” he said.

“We are absolutely, boldly confident that there should never be a dam in that gorge.”

The Wild and Scenic Legacy

It’s not clear if local officials agree.

After hearing Carson’s presentation in October, Commission Chair Jason Chappell said the next step, if commissioners choose to take it, would be to hold a public hearing. In a text exchange last week he said that one has not yet been scheduled.

The Natural Resources Council also plans to seek support from the Town of Rosman, which is immediately downstream from the North Fork. Mayor Brian Shelton said that, so far, this hasn’t happened and he doesn’t have enough information about the potential designation to voice an opinion about it.

Though this backing is not strictly necessary, it would boost the chances that federal lawmakers such as US Rep. Chuck Edwards will take the Council’s proposal to Congress, Whitmire said.

“It would be so much stronger if he saw it had the sponsorship of our local government authorities,” said Whitmire, who favors the designation for both practical and symbolic reasons.

Whitmire, 59, has been paddling the French Broad since he was a boy and the North Fork since the late 1980s. His business, which offers trips on the French Broad and fly fishing on the North Fork, depends on water quality. He knows this could be threatened by damming because he fought the Conservation Service’s plan decades ago, he said, “and that would be a battle I wouldn’t want my grand kids to fight.”

True, they might never have to even without Wild and Scenic protection, he said, acknowledging the apparent low risk of damming.

But that doesn’t eliminate the importance of making the North Fork’s status as a Wild and Scenic River official and permanent.

Transylvania is the “land of waterfalls,” the land of free-flowing rivers, he said, and the North Fork’s designation would show that its people value this defining quality of the county.

“I think it’s a good statement to make about the legacy of our river,” he said. “It would be an honor to know that one of our rivers has the highest levels of protection we can give.”

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