My Google search hits revealed someone looking for Marsh Creek Park, and having featured the creek, I thought we should visit the recently expanded park on New Hope  Road.  The name of the park derives from Marsh Creek Road, which begins just across New Hope and goes straight down to Marsh Creek.  But New Hope Road is a ridge between the Crabtree and Neuse watersheds, and the waterways in the park itself- mostly out of sight without hiking – head north through a large woodlot visible from Southall Road toward the Neuse, just a mile distant.

All pictures click to enlarge

The hot new feature in the park is the skate park, which was featured in a several media articles and is quite popular.  The large recreational center is fairly nondescript, but was constructed with green principles, as described in detail (along with other park amenities) at Get To Know a Park.  Beside the center is a large Piedmont prairie, and the extensive parking areas are adjoined by interesting ecotone areas, though the stilt grass is spreading fast.  The terrain is typical of Piedmont farmland after 50-60 years – upland pines and chestnut oaks with a slope down to loblollies, shrubs, and water.

My favorite find at Marsh Creek Park was the rain garden just below the skate park, with a wonderful stand of Joe-Pye-weed, as seen below.  I’ve only seen this handsome plant in the mountains, but it is listed in the Piedmont.  Somebody did a great job with this rain garden.

 To make the park’s name issue a little stranger, there is a really nice marshy area below the lower field, which leads to a very pretty old farm pond. It appears to have a fishing shack on the edge.  The expansion doubled the usable space of the park, but most of the acreage is still heavily wooded and ripe for exploring.  Overall, a versatile park with something for everyone.

photo album of Marsh Creek Park

Google map of Marsh Creek Park

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This section of Raleigh – the ridge of New Hope with the valley of the Neuse to the northeast and Marsh Creek’s drainage to the southwest – is of geologic interest because it is one of the transitions between the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain.  If you take Buffalo Road off New Hope, for example, you immediately start seeing sandy soils.  Just down the road from Marsh Creek Park, Skycrest Drive heads down to good old Raleigh Swamp.  Before it gets there, at the intersection with Trawick, you can find this meadow of wildflowers.  It is being sorely threatened by kudzu vines.  We will keep a closer eye on invasive species in our future nature travels.

The kudzu is right behind the dandelions.

An impressive array of wildflowers fronts the dandelions by a slope.

These blackberry flowers are beside Skycrest. This was in May, but this summer I picked almost ten quarts of these things!  They are everywhere.

Kudzu making its way toward the wildflowers.

Kudzu go’ne eat us all!!

Many waterways in Raleigh travel unseen, as does Pigeon House Branch above.  Recent years have seen efforts to rehabilitate – uncover and often “un-straighten” – creeks.  The process is called daylighting.  It helps with flood control and improves the ecosystem.  It happened in Northeast Raleigh last year, and it’s set to happen for Rocky Branch on the NCSU campus(pdf).  So Raleigh has recognized the process as valuable, but it is still an unusual occurrence.  For one Oakwood resident, stymied in efforts to have the city uncover his backyard branch, the benefits were worth the huge personal effort of unearthing the waterway himself by hand.

Grassy Branch in Oakwood

Chris Crew is a longtime Oakwood resident who co-authored the wonderful Oakwood nature essay I recently featured.  He lives on Elm Street, almost at the bottom of Oakwood’s slope.  Grassy Branch is a small but steady flow that passes under Elm Street and edges his backyard. Until a couple of years ago, it passed unseen in a large buried pipe.

Chris learned of the city daylighting program and tried to get Grassy Branch uncovered.  During heavy rains, the water backed up and even spouted out vertically from broken places in the pipes.  The city couldn’t or wouldn’t do the work because other contiguous neighbors would not enlist their properties.  Tired of the geysers and wanting a healthier backyard creek, Chris decided to do the job himself.  So he and his family hand-dug and wenched out two sections of the 42 inch pipes.

Grassy Branch re-exposed below Elm Street

I don’t have pictures of “the dig” – I just heard about Chris’ project recently.  But there is one more section he can remove before Grassy Branch crosses his property line.  I’m hoping he’ll invite me to help, and I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes!

Grassy Branch re-enters pipe

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Both Pigeon House and Rocky Branch involve daylighting projects that have or will be addressed in other posts.  An interesting neighborhood daylighting project finished up a couple of years ago near my school, the Fletcher Academy.  The picture below shows the view my students and I have on nature walks at the bottom of Cedar Hills Rotary Park. Three years ago we were looking at the creek disappear into a large pipe.

Today, the adjoining houses have less to fear from flooding, and the biological and geologic interactions missing from pipe existence have been restored to the creek.  One slightly bizarre feature of the project was the city’s purchase and destruction of a house on Mapleridge which sat practically on top of the creek.

site of former house at Big Branch

   I had the most nature fun OFF the greenway in a long time, searching the headwaters of Marsh Creek.  This prototypical Piedmont creek – running due Southeast and carrying red clay hills down to sandy flats – ends up dumping its large steady flow of water into a huge wetland at the Yonkers Road section of the Beltline – thus its name.  This lower section is full of treats, and will constitute part two of this post.  Recently I browsed through North Raleigh sewer cuts and subdivisions, climbing up Marsh Creek as I did.  My destination – the headwaters – came as a surprise, and emphasized the fascinating cross section of Northeast Raleigh this creek travels through on its way to Crabtree.

upper reaches of Marsh Creek on Google Maps

   Marsh Creek actually starts just above the blue line showing the creek on this map - at Sutton Square of Falls of the Neuse, its twin springs cradling one of the busiest - and for pedestrians, one of the most dangerous – stretches of four lane in Raleigh. This major creek, which runs for just over five miles from Spring Forest to its intersection with Crabtree, begins on the west side of Falls of the Neuse as a tiny landscaped pond (next to Northbend), and on the east side as the  rocky ditch seen below.

The little brook picks up size quickly as it travels downhill through Northeast Raleigh neighborhoods – alternating older large-lot subdivisions with newer townhouse projects.  It reaches a large natural area just above Old Wake Forest Road, and that’s where I had such fun.  A wide sewer cut gave access to a scrubby but rich haven tucked between neighborhoods, and I was able to see the deer tracks seen at the top of the post, a deer bedroom of crushed broomstraw, cute little coon prints on a sandbank, and a glimpse of a solemn woodchuck, who quickly scrambled into his hole.

Above, a mossy bank just north of Old Wake Forest Road.  Below is the sewer cut, which travels through several acres of undeveloped lowland.

After crossing Atlantic Avenue, where I found another hillside natural area covered with large, iron-rich boulders, the creek parallels that thoroughfare southward for a couple of miles – once again, touching on large older homes and much denser new developments. Before crossing New Hope Church Road it accepts the run-off from Mini-City to the east, and then enters Brentwood.  Here, the creek is the centerpiece of a long, narrow neighborhood park that runs down the center of the venerable and “transitioning” Brentwood subdivision.  It accepts the water from a neighborhood pond on Huntleigh (doubtless called a lake by the residents), and dives under Capital Boulevard, where we will pick it up the next time we visit Marsh Creek.

upper stretch of Marsh Creek

Photo album of upper Marsh Creek

Raleigh Swamp Photo Tour

Google map of area linked below:

View Larger Map