CEDAR CREEK CORRIDOR Changes in the Land By Ryan Schnurr PREFACE Welcome to the Cedar Creek corridor, a narrative carved by glaciers, commissioned by ACRES Land Trust. With this story, ACRES invites you to envision a healthy future for our region’s vital natural places—and to see your role in making this happen. Cedar Creek is one of only three rivers in the state to be designated in Indiana’s Natural, Scenic and Recreational River System under the 1973 Act of the same name. ACRES helped the waterway earn this designation in 1976 and began protecting land along Cedar Creek in 1984 with an 11-acre parcel. Today, ACRES protects 1,000 acres along the creek from south of Auburn, through Huntertown, to Leo-Cedarville, acquiring 500 acres in the last five years alone. Our momentum is building and our results will only grow. Together, with support from our members and donors, ACRES promises to never sell or transfer this land: These places along Cedar Creek are protected forever. This story is about this place and some of the people who protect it. More than this incredible story, it’s about taking responsibility for our appreciation for the life our land sustains. The protection of the Cedar Creek corridor demonstrates what’s possible when people who love a place come together over time, to keep it safe, acre by acre. Together, we have the ability to respond to the natural world; we can choose to change the story for our community, for the natural communities to which we belong. With growing support, ACRES will ensure the permanent protection of many such local conservation areas—forever. There’s so much more to do. On Cedar Creek and beyond. Will you join us? Regional Conservation Areas ACRES protects land within five conservation areas in addition to Cedar Creek: Along the Eel, Elkhart and Wabash rivers and in the Pokagon State Park/Wing Haven area near Angola. Learn more: cedarcreek.acreslandtrust.org ACRES Land Trust 3 Changes in the Land By Ryan Schnurr Imagine, for a moment, you’re suspended high above Allen County, Indiana— maybe you’re in an airplane, or maybe you’re hovering digitally. Looking toward the earth, trace your eyes northeast from downtown Fort Wayne, ten miles or so, along the St. Joseph River, and hang a left—to the northwest—at the mouth of Cedar Creek. Almost immediately the landscape changes: most obviously, there are many, many more trees. The ground is steeper too, and the flora shifts, but you probably don’t notice. From above, you see only a wooly-green swath of land following the creek upstream, from Leo-Cedarville to beyond North County Line Road. This dark crowd of vegetation represents the most significant tract of undeveloped land in Allen County: The Cedar Creek Corridor. To find the start of Cedar Creek, you have to go to DeKalb County, where it’s slothing out of Cedar Lake. From there it carries on thirty-odd miles, moving in a generally southern direction, then zagging southeast into Allen County to join the flow of the St. Joseph River. Most of the land in Cedar Creek’s watershed is classified agricultural, though it is increasingly commercial, residential, and industrial, too. The stream To date, ACRES Land Trust, Indiana’s oldest and largest local land trust, itself is flanked by a slim hedge of trees most of its route, until it nears protects 7,000 acres on 100 properties in the tristate area. Our 1,700 members the county line, where its banks are swarmed by, among others, maple, make it possible to keep the land we love and value, for so many reasons, safe. red oak, beech, walnut, cherry, buckeye, and sycamore. This lower With your help, we’ll do more. You’re invited to play your part in this legacy. 13.7 miles—the Corridor—is a mixed bag of ecological communities, Memberships starts at $25 annually: acreslandtrust.org/join including forest, prairie, marsh, lake, and fen. 4 CHANGES IN THE LAND: Cedar Creek Corridor Photo by Thomas Sprunger ACRES Land Trust 5 Photo by Jarrid Spicer Lately, I’ve spent a lot of time in the Corridor. Like most people, I am interested in anomalies, and the Corridor is one. Besides its undevelopment, the Corridor’s steep, rugged topography includes the only canyon around. The canyon averages eighty-two feet in depth. Its floor is an average of fifteen-hundred feet wide. You can find uncommon plants there, like blue-eyed mary, green dragon, and yellow lady’s slipper. You can find bobcats, too. (I haven’t.) It is as beautiful as you imagine, and, especially in the springtime, greener. Once, Indiana considered converting the area into a State Park. Before interstates, before nature preserves, before Allen County itself, the stream we now call Cedar was a slow leak from a retreating glacier. It ran northwest One of my favorite ways to get to know a place is to just walk around for a while beneath the ice, through a hollow cut in the ground. “It’s called a tunnel valley and gawk. On a hot day, early summer, I hiked around the forty-seven-acre or a tunnel channel,” Tony Fleming, a freelance geologist, told me. We were on Vandolah Nature Preserve, near the midway point of the Corridor. The terrain the south wall of the Corridor, a few miles upstream of Vandolah. “You’ll see this varied. I started in a field before crossing through forest and down a ridge to a upper part, near Coldwater Road, for about three or four miles, is just perfectly marsh, then followed a trail through wooded ravines. I watched a hummingbird straight, sheer-walled, heading to the northwest. And right here it’s coming out dance around honeysuckle; balanced on an uprooted tree; crossed and re-crossed of the front of an end moraine, called the Wabash moraine, where the ice stood a stream; fed half a dozen mosquitos; sat by the water and listened for wood for a while and built up debris…It was flowing from the southeast, back in the ice ducks. Mostly, I heard cars—a peculiarity of Vandolah is that I-69, cruising the sheet, up to the northwest. And it exited the ice sheet right here.” western boundary, is within earshot of all forty-seven acres, and visible from a lot of them. Fleming looks like he belongs outside. He has sharp eyes, a grizzled-gray beard, and thin, wispy hair that he often keeps under a hat. He carries himself with the On the return loop, sweating through my shirt, I paused to look at the interstate. confidence of a person who always knows where he is, and right now, he does. It’s impossible to miss—a wide concrete path hurtling parallel to the field. I In 1994, Fleming wrote the book on Cedar Creek—A Hydrogeology of Allen took out my notebook and jotted a short phrase: changes in the land. I wish County, Indiana: A Geologic and Ground-Water Atlas, which includes an extended I could claim this language, but I can’t. It’s the title of a book by the historian treatment of the creek’s foundation. At the time, he was working for the Indiana William Cronon, about the effects of settlement on the ecology of New England. Geological Survey. For the past twenty years, he’s been self-employed. Many of the I invoked it then as a kind of shorthand, to denote a landscape under the influence projects Fleming takes on are for organizations dealing, in one way or another, with of culture and economy. Which is another way of saying: nothing is static. And the nature and conservation. Some of them are located in the Cedar Creek Corridor. Corridor represents an ideal vantage-ground from which to consider the forces “I always say, ‘nature starts from the ground up,’” he told me. “The reason you at work on the life of a place. have certain patterns of natural communities is the geology…as simple as that.” 6 CHANGES IN THE LAND: Cedar Creek Corridor ACRES Land Trust 7 Where Cedar Creek is concerned, that geology was changing rapidly (geologically speaking) as the Erie Lobe melted east. The glacier’s meltwater, which was for the most part heading northwest through this tunnel valley, was hauling a lot of stuff with it—silt, sand, boulders, clay—that had been dredged up by the glacier. The canyon was probably between eight hundred and a thousand feet wide then. Soon (again, geologically speaking), the sediment choked the northwest end of the valley. The flow of water reversed—toward the St. Joseph—and was captured by a fledgling creek advancing from the east, in a classic example of good old- fashioned “stream piracy.” Fleming reads landscapes like many of us read English. “The channel is much deeper than what you see here,” he said. “It was cut down probably another hundred or more feet below creek level and then filled back up partially with sand and gravel as the flow waned. And if you go further downstream, to the southeast, and you look at a map, it’s not straight like it is up here. Those are relic ice cracks. So it was flowing beneath the glacier through cracks in the ice, and then it got up this direction, cut down, and exited the ice right here.” In a sedimentary landscape like this one, nothing is set in stone. The same unconsolidated material that makes the landscape fertile also makes it malleable, so the Corridor remains in flux—rivers meandering, ridges eroding.