CARTHAGE (Tribune News Service) — For roughly a decade, a seemingly unlikely partnership between conservationists and the Department of Defense has allowed Fort Bragg to conduct military training on several thousand acres of undeveloped woodland in Moore County.
It is conservation land, set aside in perpetuity, but at the same time is coveted training ground for today's camouflaged global warrior with Army special operations.
Most people are unaware of the Deep River Initiative, a collaboration among Sandhills Area Land Trust, the Department of Defense and North Carolina's Clean Water Management Trust Fund. Through the partnership, mostly large tracts of land along the Deep River in northern Moore have been acquired and protected.
About 2,200 acres is available for special operations exercises.
"It has been all hush-hush," said Karl Legatski, a conservationist who played an integral role in the creation of Fayetteville's Cape Fear River Trail. "Nobody knows what we're up to over there.
"The story is the collaboration," said Legatski, who is 70, and president of the board of Sandhills Area Land Trust. "You don't see things put together like that very often."
Nancy Talton is executive director of the land trust, a nonprofit group that serves Moore and five surrounding counties. Established in 1991, the organization works with landowners to negotiate voluntary conservation agreements on private property.
"The land trust is one of the first in the nation to do something like this," Talton said of its collaboration with the Defense Department. "We're the only one in the nation conducting this for Special Forces. That's the uniqueness of it. We just have a special little project. It has certainly been a benefit to the area as a whole."
"What we are doing is preserving land for compatible use," Talton said.
When the program began, Army Special Operations Command conducted survival and escape training in Moore County under a verbal agreement with the landowners. But those agreements started to fall through as some property owners cleared their land to sell timber and land ownership changed hands.
As a result, the Army needed to acquire training ground for special operations. While it has no interest in owning the property, the military requires access to the land off post for "zero impact" training, Legatski said.
The solution? A cooperative agreement with the land trust in which the organization would purchase land and treat it as conservation property. The partnership identifies those areas for protection while also creating sites vital for "leave no trace" military activity, Legatski said.
Fort Bragg and the land trust receive help through the Clean Water Management Trust Fund, which assists with the protection of drinking water supplies in the state.
The Deep River is a significant waterway in the state, and Clean Water plays a key role in the procurement of property along the corridor. With a reduction in funding in these areas, Clean Water is among the last remaining sources available to land trusts. This is the main funding organization trying to protect such unique places in North Carolina, said Jesse Wimberley of Sandhills Area Land Trust.
The land is available to the Army through a five-year agreement, which is required by the government. The current contract is nearing its expiration date. The parties are negotiating a new agreement for another five years.
The initiative takes a "landscape scale" approach to conservation and land protection, Legatski said, with consideration for the rural lifestyle and historical use of the land.
Fort Bragg must preserve and sustain the land it trains on, while protecting it from incompatible encroachment. That could be the building of a cellphone tower on the land, development of a brightly lit multifamily subdivision or erecting solar panel farms.
"They kind of downplayed DOD's involvement in it. They didn't want to publicize the military's interest in acquiring this land," Legatski said. "That's where a lot of the funding was coming from. I think they finally arrived at the point where they would publicly acknowledge that's what they're up to."
The fertile Piedmont land of the "clay country" along the Deep River in upper Moore County that Wimberley visited last week lies in sharp contrast to that found in the longleaf pine ecosystem of the Sandhills.
Wimberley, 56, is outreach coordinator for the land trust. He evaluates parcels of land to see if they're suitable for the Deep River Initiative with the Department of Defense.
"At the end of the day," he said, "we're protecting larger tracts of land that have great community value."
By the banks of Big Governor's Creek stand sycamores, beech and a plethora of oak trees. Here, as Wimberley explains it, the clay loam soils are different from the coarse sands of the Sandhills. The surrounding midstory and canopy vegetation is denser and more diverse, which affords more cover for military training.
Markers are posted on some scraggly oaks on the land trust property, which has long been known as Harrington family land. The markers read, "Protected Conservation Area."
"We just took this land a few years ago. This is new land for us. There's some real high conservation values up in this area. The Cape Fear shiner is one example," Wimberley said of the federally endangered minnow-sized fish. "The Piedmont, from a natural history standpoint, is about gone."
All the area, he noted, was much more heavily populated at one time. "That right there is power," he said, peering down at the coffee-colored river from a bridge.
At a third and final stop, the liquid center of the Deep River was moving swiftly. Tree limbs hung over the water, like gnarled fingers, and a cold breeze blew through as a plane flew overhead.
"This is a major corridor for North Carolina we're standing on," Wimberley said, after carefully trekking down a steep incline to reach the old river. "It was like the lifeblood. That's why we want to protect it."
Few people now live in the area. Wimberley said those who do are not alarmed by the frequent presence of soldiers from Fort Bragg.
"Everybody up here is accustomed to it," he said. "They're a very receptive community to it up here. Robin Sage has been going on for years."
Robin Sage is a role-playing exercise staged in Moore and 14 other counties in the Cape Fear region. For this training, Special Forces candidates support guerrilla forces in the fictional country of Pineland. The exercise has been held regularly since 1974.
Robin Sage is the final training exercise before students graduate and move to a Special Forces assignment.
It is not to be confused with the special operations' training staged on the initiative land.
Michael Paschal put in about four miles of Deep River frontage on a conservation easement with the land trust. He started putting the land in easement about 10 years ago.
"I still have property that borders a lot of the conservation districts. It creates a (protected) amenity, as if it were a state park," he said.
The easements he has put on the property he owns forbid anyone on the property without his permission. But he said he has sold properties to conservation groups that allow for on-site military exercises, and Paschal doesn't have a problem with it.
Paschal, who is 52 and works in real estate in Fayetteville, gives all the credit to his father, Lawrence, who years ago fell in love with the tranquil setting in the Glendon community of Moore County. Both his father and grandfather, George Paschal, were born along the Deep River. Lawrence Paschal bought a lot of nearby land over the decades. His intention was for the area to remain unchanged, his son said, adding that it has within his lifetime.
"I have security that the area will not be developed in the future," he said.
The Deep River, a tributary of the Cape Fear River, is roughly 125 miles long. It flows through northern Moore County and across Lee County before feeding into the Cape Fear River, downstream from Jordan Lake.
The Cape Fear is the major source of water for Fayetteville and much of this region.
Because of its mature forest and biological diversity, the Deep River and the adjacent land is recognized as an important natural heritage, or conservation area. The river passes by such historical sites as the House in the Horseshoe, about five miles north of Carthage in Moore County. The home was built about 1770, in a horseshoe bend in the Deep River and was the site of a minor Revolutionary War engagement in 1781.
The Deep River project falls into Fort Bragg training land, along with 160,000 acres on the installation and another 54,000 acres of N.C. Game Lands around Camp Mackall, according to retired Col. Jon Chase. An agreement with the state of North Carolina makes the Game Lands available to the Army.
Chase is chief of the training division with the Directorate of Plans, Training, Mobilization and Security on Fort Bragg.
Earlier this month, Fort Bragg garrison commander Col. Jeffrey Sanborn said troops have access to 72,000 acres off post.
The 2,200 acres along the Deep River include land that is "critically important for national security," said Legatski, president of the land trust board. The largely unoccupied land lies in undisturbed woods and is suitable for certain kinds of predeployment exercises required for dangerous overseas operations.
On Fort Bragg, fire is a natural part of its longleaf forest management. Because of that, the woodlands on post have reduced midstory that makes it difficult to find enough cover to evade detection. It is primarily open forest. While ideal for wildlife and certain types of training, some military exercises require heavier cover in natural settings.
The compatible land protected by the land trust in northern Moore is geared toward hiding and detecting.
"The fact is, we have 160,000 acres on Bragg that we train on, and we ain't getting anymore," Chase said.
The property along the Deep River, Chase said, "supports the type of training that's done on there. Fort Bragg does a lot of what it calls low-impact, live-maneuver training. We like to train on areas that are generally forested, has some kind of understory that kind of affects your observation, and allows people to maneuver through and do their military training.
"The idea of relatively rolling hills with stream beds, somewhat restricted terrain and terrain compatibility with the biology of the area - forests and wiregrass savannah and those kind of things - soldiers like to train on and maneuver," Chase said.
The land trust started to maintain several land protection efforts in the Deep River area before the current collaboration was conceived, according to Talton. Early on, the organization protected some parcels through conservation easements. In other cases, property owners opted to sell land.
A previous agreement between the parties allowed returning soldiers from the first Persian Gulf War, including those on temporary medical leave, to do their service hours on land trust-owned property, Talton said.
"So SALT had a previous federal cooperative agreement working with the training department at Fort Bragg," she said. "People involved at Fort Bragg realized this was successful - SALT was a good entity to perhaps work on a new cooperative agreement."
As a result, the land trust has quietly orchestrated the Deep River Initiative.
"From the landowner's point of view, there's not a whole lot of tax benefits from donating land," Legatski said. Much of that "has gone away. It's getting harder and harder to find funding to buy conservation properties. We're getting the Clean Water Management Trust Fund and Department of Defense to jointly fund this kind of project.
"I think it's genuinely unique."
futchm@fayobserver.com
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