[gentle music] - During the flood that we experienced in Helene, the water was 12 to 15 feet above our heads right here, which was much higher than we had ever observed before or would have expected.

Conserving Carolina, the Land Conservancy in this region owns three projects and those three properties together held an estimated 1.25 billion gallons of water during the peak of the Helene floods.

While the rest of the water in the river moved down valley, that water was retained here.

That type of feature along this valley is really important as we look to the future and the potential for more floods like that to protect property, prevent downstream flooding, protect infrastructure and and human lives.

[upbeat music] - Conserving Carolina is a regional land trust, based in Henderson County, which is in the mountains of western North Carolina.

- We are at Pleasant Grove, which is a restoration site along the French Broad River in Etowah and Henderson County.

And it is one of a chain of restoration sites that Conserving Carolina has been working on throughout the French Broad River corridor.

Places like this can give us a more resilient landscape that is better able to handle the blows of a changing climate.

They protect our communities during flood events by giving the water a place to go that isn't destructive, a place where it can spill over and it's meant to spill over.

And these floodplains hold really huge amounts of water.

- [David] And then we also do a lot of creation of wetlands and excavating floodplain pools in order to store water in those dryer dries that we expect to see.

- If you're not sending all of the water straight into the river channel and just like telling it "goodbye", you know, down river, then it stays here, it stays here for a while.

[tranquil music] Historically, in the last couple of hundred years, we really changed the way the river works.

- The history of the French Broad River is similar to many rivers in the eastern United States in that they were dredged out and straightened to some extent to allow for boat traffic.

- People moved water off of the land with ditches.

They built berms along the side of the river and the whole idea was to have like, the land be the land and the water be the water and the river is just gonna run in this channel.

And if that's all you're used to, then maybe that's what you think like a river is.

It's like it's just a line, a line of water that moves through the landscape.

But really it would be like a broader corridor of wet land.

- [David] Our ultimate goal is to restore that hydrology and keep as much water on the floodplain as possible.

- [Greg] The type of engineering that we do here is focused on the natural environment.

This entire property was a golf course until 10 years ago.

- [Rose] This beautiful creek used to be a deep ditch.

It, you know, it wasn't picturesque and it wasn't that great for wildlife and it also caused a lot of erosion.

So there was a restoration to bring the creek back to a healthy natural state.

- We have a whole series of wetland cells that are throughout the property.

This whole eight acres of wetland developed, by plugging a ditch up.

- There were, already on this site, two ponds.

So one of those ponds is still there as a pond.

And the other pond, we dug a channel connecting the pond to the river and that creates a backwater slough.

Sloughs would've once been common along the French Broad and were largely eliminated from the upper French Broad River corridor to the extent that it's not really even a word that people are that familiar with.

So slough is a word that we have to kind of introduce people to, S-L-O-U-G-H.

So if you see the word written out, now you know how to say it.

[tranquil piano music] - We have seven acres of water that is still water, but it's connected to the river so the fish can easily come in and out and they have lots of room up here.

And the Musky in particular being such a large fish.

- Musky, are a big toothy fish.

They're an apex predator that is native to the French Broad River.

They get well over 35 inches and we've caught 'em up close to 50 inches.

- The population declined to the point that in 1970 the Wildlife Commission started stocking Musky.

- Musky have really specific spawning requirements.

Their eggs aren't sticky like some other species, and so when they spawn they kind of just lay on the bottom.

So these slack water areas are important.

- [Scott] It allows them to get off of the conveyor belt to a less stressful environment to spawn and go through that egg development in early life stages.

[upbeat music] - [Amanda] All of the Musky that we've stocked from 2018 through 2022, all were implanted with a little pit tag, which is very similar to what you would put in like your pet.

- The tag is like their social security number.

When the fish swims across the antenna, the antenna talks to a little copper coil that's inside this glass tag.

So we know who they are, when we tagged them, where they came from.

- Just in this slough at Pleasant Grove, we've detected 29 Musky.

The detection equipment's been active since May 2023, and so that's a little less than a year and a half.

So that's actually quite a lot.

[chuckles] So we're pretty excited about that.

[tranquil music] - [Rose] We're all part of nature, so like what's good for nature is also good for human beings to flourish.

- [David] At our Dodd Meadows restoration site, we restored about 1500 linear feet of stream, and we had the opportunity to also install a multi-use walking path adjacent to that stream.

That's really important because right next to the site, is a pretty large, Habitat for Humanity community with a lot of residents.

- Before Conserving Carolinas came in, that was not somewhere you wanted to go.

It was a straight line.

It was deep, debris would go down in there.

It was full of, lots of trees and trash.

It was just not a place to go, not a place to go walk, not a place for children.

It was really beyond our expectation, what we wound up with.

We have families that go down and walk on the trail, children play in the creek.

The mental health of children, when they have green spaces, it's 55 to 60% better as adults.

So it's really a great, you know, surrounding of the community.

- Seeing that the power of nature, just doing what it does best is really inspiring to me.

To know that we can go in and make some of these minor changes to the land and then see it become its fullest is just super exciting.

[tranquil guitar music] - In the last five years, we've had a really strong focus on restoration projects.

So within that period of time we completed the Mouth of Mud Creek Restoration, which was the first large scale, natural floodplain restoration in the mountains in North Carolina.

It was kind of a new thing that we tried and we've seen like really good results on all kinds of levels.

And what we've seen too is just so much interest.

As soon as people could see, "oh, Riverside property could be like this," there were a lot of people that were like, "my property also has this potential."

- [David] I think part of the reason that that's true is because there are so many benefits to these projects.

- Once you start to have like this growing network of natural floodplain areas along the river corridor, you can really imagine the river being, you know, quite different in the future and in a way that is better.

And I think that's really valuable because I think a lot of times when we look to the future, we have so many things to worry about.

We have so many things that are not going well, right?

But you can also look toward things that are going well, that are getting better, that are hopeful.

And the more we do of that, the better world we'll live in and the better world that we'll pass on to our children and grandchildren.

I think you really can imagine a French Broad River corridor where restoration is widespread in these kind of, habitat areas are common along the river.