My friend Norb is a retired high school science teacher, student of botany, godfather of the local flyfishing scene, and a wonderful person to meet over Faith Healers in the yard of Homeplace. I arranged just such a summit with Norb and Felix earlier this summer to talk about our local rivers. Summer 2024 started out exceptionally warm and dry, and the river had become uncannily comfortable for swimming. On the first of July I measured a water temperature of 76° in the South Toe – the warmest I’d ever recorded and, anecdotally, the warmest that anyone else could recall (sadly the USGS streamgage on the South Toe does not measure temperature or water quality). I’d also recently posted about the high water signs we’d recently installed at the South Toe streamgage, and Norb has a wealth of information about historic floods in the valley, so we got together to talk high water, warm water, and the future of our rivers in a changing climate.
Norb grew up on the North Toe and recalled how nasty the rivers were, even after the Clean Water Act and EPA came into existence. It took awhile before federal enforcement trickled up into the headwaters of Appalachia. Norb credits the 1977 flood with finally scouring out years of mining waste and raw sewage that had been accumulating in the North Toe. Though our rivers have had their tribulations in the intervening decades (occasional wastewater spills and illegal mine dumping), after 1977 the EPA was better able to maintain clean water standards for the Toe River Valley, and our rivers have become renowned for trout fishing and recreation.
As for the river’s current day (and future) temperatures, Norb thinks that the long-term outlook for trout is bleak in all but the coolest tributaries. This conversation was held three months before Helene scoured the banks of the tributaries and the river alike, eliminating a wide swath of riverside shade. The sunny riverbed is now 2X-4X as wide as it was before the storm, and likewise the tributaries. If we have another warm dry spell next summer, I would not be surprised to see an 80° river reading.
Norb also referenced a book I’d heard of but not yet encountered – The Carolina Mountains by Margaret W. Morley. Published in 1913, The Carolina Mountains is a travelog based on Morley’s turn-of-the-century forays deep into the mountains from her home base in Tryon. Norb cited Morley as claiming that the Toe river valleys “are too narrow and prone to severe flooding to ever support many people living there. If she saw them today I wonder if she’d change her mind or just say wait and see.” After Helene, I remembered what Norb had said, and I knew I had to get my hands on Morley’s book. This week I finally acquired a copy (fortunately it was reprinted by Bright Mountain Books in 2006).
Morley was clearly well-read in Appalachian botany, and was an astute naturalist. Please enjoy this excerpt about the Black Mountains and the Toe River Valley. My best guess is that the flood in Bakersville and Spruce Pine that she refers to was the flood of May 21, 1901.
To the west of the Black Mountain Range tightly inclosing the narrow Cane River Valley, is a jumble of wild mountains, among which Yeates Knob reaches an elevation of six thousand feet, while to the north of the range lies the valley of Little Crabtree Creek between the Blacks and the rugged mountains beyond. Hence the valleys that nearly surround the Black Mountains are deep and narrow, and the streams rushing through them are very swift, clear, and, from the rapidity with which they rise during a storm, dangerous, the Estatoe, or Toe River, as it is commonly called, and its branches being among the most dangerous of the mountain streams.
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While the Cane River Valley is comparatively well peopled, the wild valley of the South Toe has as yet few inhabitants, but you will want to go there because the river, strong and wild and clear as crystal, has coming into it the merriest of trout brooks straight down from the sky, and because the valley itself is a most glorious wilderness, to be in which gives one a feeling of having escaped. Enormous trees grow on the slopes of the mountains- oaks, chestnuts, beeches, and magnolias mingling their foliage above your head as you wander along the woodland paths where brooks murmur among the ferns, and the rhododendrons are grown to trees. From Burnsville one can get to this fair, wild valley by following down the Little Crabtree Creek four or five miles to Micaville, a village that consists of a post-office and very little else.
The Toe River throughout its course is famous for its floods, which may be why the South Toe Valley, which is quite wide in places, is so sparsely settled. But it is the North Toe that holds the prize record in this matter. After the memorable floodyear when Bakersville was so nearly washed away, one saw debris in the tree limbs some twenty-five or thirty feet above the level of the stream in the narrow cut near Spruce Pine. Everything had given way before the fury of the waters, including the iron bridge that had recently been built across the troublesome stream. To have an iron bridge meant much to the people, you may be sure, and no doubt the story told was true of how they gathered together on the riverbank and stood for hours watching the bridge as the water rose and covered it, and how when at last it gave way and went with a crash downstream some of the watchers wrung their hands and wept.
From The Carolina Mountains by Margaret W. Morley, 1913