The Holston River Watershed

While I haven’t had a chance to get into the water at any of the Holston River tributaries this semester, I thoroughly enjoyed my adventures in the watershed. I was able to visit new places and place s I had been to many times with a ne w perspective.   Taylor’s Valley is a place I visit frequently since it has excellent trout fishing and we have friends in the area . While I usually sit and enjoy the q uiet and a good book w hile my partner fishes, I have spent the last f ew trips id entifying p lants. I found a horse chestnu t, wh ich is n’t a real chestnut, the last time I was there and gave it to my mom who has fond memories of playing with horse chestnuts as a child.     Beartree Lake was a new location for me, and it is a small park within Mount Rodger’ recreational area. This adventure was interesting because when I arrived, it was a complete ghost town . M y planned trail was hard to find, and when I eventually found it, there was a fallen tre...

Flood Plains in Taylor's Valley A while ago, I had the opportunity to interview Ciera Yates, a resident of Taylor’s Valley that was strongly impacted by Hurricane Helen e in September of 2024. Since I am focusing on flood plains this week, I decided to do some digging on the area and find out why the flooding was so extreme.   Figure 1: The area in light blue has a 1% annual chance of being a flood hazard according to FEMA (NOAA, n.d.) .   When I first saw figure 1 , I thought that a 1% chance was quite low, and the residents of Taylor’s Valley had suffered from a once a century flood. After looking further into the Federal Emergency Management Agency ( F EMA ) website, I discovered that if an area has a 1% annual chance of flooding , then the area is considered high risk . These zones have a 1 in 4 chance of flooding during a 30-year period, which is the length of a typical mortgage (FEMA, 2024). These chances may not be as high as areas along coasts, but when flood...