Help make Allens Creek healthier with a stream improvement project noon to 4 p.m. March 29-30, and possibly Friday, March 31, in Waynesville. 

The project will take place at BearWaters Brewing’s new location in Hazelwood at 1940 Main Street. It includes two phases, the first of which is livestaking, which will take place on the work dates this week. Live stakes are branches of trees cut while trees are dormant and planted directly in the soil, where they develop roots and grow into new trees. 

The second phase, in May, will involve planting native plants and trees, helping create a more diverse ecosystem while also stabling the streambank and reducing pollution entering Allens Creek. 

Haywood Waterways Association is partnering with Spriggly’s Beescaping to complete the project. Volunteers are invited to come anytime, even just for an hour, and should bring a good pair of boots, hammers or rubber mallets, gloves and clothes that can get dirty. For more information, contact Caitlin Worsham at 828.476.4667, ext. 12 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . 

Nearly two decades ago, Eric Romaniszyn joined the nonprofit world as the new project manager for Haywood Waterways Association .

Waynesville Middle School student Kate Clark is the winner of this year’s Haywood Waterways Association Kids in the Creek T-shirt design contest, meeting success at her first try entering an art contest.

It’s a sunny, abnormally warm October afternoon, and Tom Anspach is ready to meet it with a canoe on the Pigeon River.

But Anspach, accompanied by 19-year-old Josh Arford, isn’t there to paddle for miles or fish for trout. He’s there to fish for trash.

Just like Haywood County’s watershed, fed by springs that all have their start inside county borders, Cherokee mythology surrounding places in Haywood is all about beginnings.

“All of the Cherokee myths and legends here in Haywood County are about origins,” Barbara Duncan, education director of the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, told the crowd gathered at Haywood Waterways Association’s end-of-year banquet last week. “This is a fascinating parallel to me with the geography.”

There’s excitement in the air as the class, its members scattered across the Pigeon River under cloudy skies in Canton, hunches over the water in an enthusiastic search. Slightly encumbered by awkwardly bulging, oversize wader suits, class members turn over rocks, shuffle their feet across the river bottom and generally stir things up to flush any nearby aquatic creatures into their waiting nets. 

Haywood Waterways Association has provided this education program year after year for eighth-graders in Haywood County, but on Sept. 24, the class wasn’t composed of over-energetic teenagers.

Take a walk in mid-May, and you probably won’t get far before finding somebody bent over a garden bed, weeding. Eric Romaniszyn and Christine O’Brien were doing just that on a warm Thursday afternoon, but they weren’t in a garden — they were on a stream bank. Specifically, they were on the bank alongside Richland Creek at Vance Street Park in Waynesville. 

“We try to take every little piece out,” Romaniszyn said, yanking a clump of Japanese knotweed roots out of the dirt and stowing them in the trash bag by his side.

A trust fund backed by Progress Energy that has funneled more than $2 million and counting to water quality projects in Haywood County since the mid-1990s is not in jeopardy following the merger of the utility with Duke Energy.

While the Pigeon River Trust Fund isn’t threatened in the short term, the lucrative water quality funding stream isn’t a sure bet forever.

The annual payment of $290,000 ponied up by Progress Energy — and soon by Duke post merger — will eventually run out.

A $500 grant was awarded to Haywood Waterways Association by the Haywood County Community Foundation to expand Haywood Waterways’ sediment monitoring program and establish five new monitoring sites in the Raccoon Creek watershed.

The new sites will help identify areas where sediment, the top water quality problem in Haywood County, is running off. Once identified, Haywood Waterways and its partners can seek grants to assist willing landowners correct these problems.

The sediment monitoring program in the Raccoon Creek Watershed is a smaller part of a county-wide effort that was started more than nine years ago.

In 2006, the state designated as “impaired” sections of Richland and Raccoon creeks, meaning there weren’t as many fish and bug species as a clean stream should have. Haywood Waterways and its partners, including Haywood Soil & Water Conservation District, are working to reduce sedimentation throughout the Richland Creek Watershed, which includes Raccoon Creek.

Sediment enters streams and lakes though erosion and runoff. Once in the water sediment fills the spaces between rocks and smothers the spaces where macroinvertebrate insects live and fish lay eggs. Sediment also clogs intake pipes for industry and agriculture, as well as favorite swimming holes.