A late snow and a schoolday off to blog about it! It didn’t take long to find a snow paradise. The Oakwood Inn’s block sported the lacy treetops above. But I was headed to the greenway. I decided to check out an old favorite – the east end of Buckeye Trail.
This wonderful view is the edge of the meadow at Buckeye Trail’s east end off Milburnie. Down this oldest section of Raleigh’s greenways is a vista that provoked one of the first thoughts that originated this project – and it was a book project long before I ever knew what a blog was. The scene used to look like a cathedral of treetops – but the loss of a huge red oak several years ago changed the look. What’s left is seen below.
The missing tree was on the right, and when it was there, I was ready to write a book partly to tell people to come here and take a deep breath. It is still a very nice section of greenway. I got to see the baby beeches of a couple of posts ago in a new light, literally. The gentle snow provided a chance to see water moving across the greenway: in a freshet, and being blocked by the asphalt. The creek was medium high, which I documented with a current shot of my favorite log-sitting spot. Once I had done that, I knew I should head over to Hodge Road and take shots of my water level standard spots, which I’m documenting over on the nature projects blog.
The March snow was mighty pretty!
Raleigh in 1872
Google Map of Raleigh
Topo Map of My Childhood
Google Image of Buckeye Trail
Raleigh is, of course, an invented city. Planned in advance at a tavern somewhere between Litchford and Falls of the Neuse, drawn in regular squares, purchased from Joel Lane for about $3 an acre, 400 acres of the one thousand purchased were divided and sold in lots to the prominent families who expected to inhabit it, with five large squares reserved for community purposes. It is reminiscient of D.C. in its ordered squares and patterns of street names, but nevertheless a fairly typical large Southern town in many respects, with a seasoning of “cow-path roads” to leaven those squares. The early city expanded its boundaries in 1857, avoided destruction in 1865, and then then expanded again in 1907 with some of the South’s first “suburbs,” – serviced by trolley lines! Hayes Barton, named for the deer-filled English homeland of Sir Walter, was a prime example. Raleigh’s growth went straight north for many decades after that, but has recently expanded in lots of directions -though not evenly. Rural scenes can still be had with just a few minutes driving going south or especially east.
**********
Crabtree Creek dominates Raleigh geography, just as it does this blog. It drains a huge swath of land across Wake County. Its head waters are in west Cary and it empties into the Neuse at Anderson Point just off US 64 East. In between, it makes a slow northward curve that defined the Beltline right of way with useless lowlands, then slopes southward to its union with the Neuse. If Crabtree stayed full, it would be a river itself, and it often outdoes the Neuse in flow after heavy rains. But ours is a low flow water system with periodic normal droughts. Crabtree often barely moves through the huge ditches it has carved into the sediments of lowland Raleigh. When it roars, it scours these floodplains with a muddy concoction of tree trunks, lumber and flotsam that can dress the landscape in astonishing sights. Thus the cheap right-of-way. But no more! Stores on huge slabs of fill dirt, townhouses on stilts, rich slopeside houses with mandatory first floor basements – Raleigh has embraced the floodplains. And Crabtree has been ditched and channeled, dammed and diverted to save the shopping center. Walnut Creek’s much smaller but intricate watershed drains the southern half of the city. And Swift Creek below that flows through and forms some of the most fascinating wildlife areas in the Triangle.
************
Water is what maps an area. We get ours from Falls Lake, due north, and return the treated waste water to the Neuse southeast of here. Crabtree and Walnut Creek wrap around the high ground of downtown and North Hills like bow legs, reaching the river just a couple of miles apart. Our waterways have gained the dual importance of riparian buffer and wildlife habitat, and the parks and greenways map right on to the waterways with few exceptions. A map of wildlife inside the beltline might as well be a map of the creeks. So that is where this blog will tend to find itself – streamside.
The Natural History of Raleigh
Raleigh lies at the edge of the Piedmont, edging the eastward coastal plain with long ridges of ancient, deformed and partly rotted granite called the Raleigh Belt on geology maps. Tucked into these ridges are gnarled streamcut valleys and occasional domes of harder, younger granite that have withstood the slow erosion of the Piedmont “peneplain” – the huge flattened wedge of material washed down over millions of years from the formerly towering Appalachian mountains. The topographical features of the Piedmont are not pushed or folded up, but instead cut into this gently sloping plateau by the slow relentless action of water. “Our landscape … deepens”, says Michael Godfrey in the bible of Piedmont naturalism. In Raleigh, this process has created a broad rippled dome that shoulders down to the beginnings of the Coastal Plain. The gently rolling hills of clay to our west and north represent a very different landscape from the sandy flats just to our south and east.
***********
I learned this topography bicycling around central Raleigh ( which, in the late fifties and early sixties, was all the Raleigh there was). I experienced this topography gravitationally and intuitively. As a teenager I discovered that downtown sat on a flattened dome, so that if I got a good start in the parking lot of Tabernacle Baptist Church on Person Street, I could ride all the way home from choir practice no hands, nearly all the way going downhill to my suburb at the edge of Crabtree Creek’s floodplain in East Raleigh. As a young child in this neighborhood, I has already fallen in love with Crabtree Creek, which along with Walnut Creek to the south, carves and shapes Raleigh’s lowlands. Crabtree became a strong symbol in my life, framing a big chunk of my childhood memories and haunting my early bad poetry.
***********
Now as an adult I find the city has paved and bridged all of my childhood creek haunts and more, providing a greenway system that maps the waterways and helps defend a buffer of streamside woods that is the final refuge for an astounding variety of wildlife and botanical wonders. These gar, coons, deer, turtles and woodpeckers eke out a co-existence with an emerging mid-sized city. Raleigh wants and tries so hard to be a “real” city, with all that implies. Yet it retains some of the best features of a Southern town, not least of which is close proximity to authentic rural landscape. And one of the best and most-promoted urban features is the park and greenway system. With much continued support, this resource can assure us of a unique place in the hierarchy of national destinations. Join me to explore Raleigh’s parks, greenways, and other natural areas. I promise you will be impressed by the sights and nature lore to be found inside the beltline or within a mile of it.
***********
go to Natural History of Raleigh Photos
raleighnaturalist
