Can a quarry and NC state park make good neighbors? Two views from across Crabtree Creek

“Should it have taken this long? No,” Spooner said. “Does it? Apparently yes.”

A 48-year relationship with the park

Jean Spooner’s first night in North Carolina was spent in a tent in Umstead State Park in 1976. She had just graduated from Cornell University with a degree in agronomy and drove to Raleigh for her graduate school interviews at N.C. State. She saw Umstead on a map and figured the campground would be a good option for someone on a student’s budget.

Spooner went on to earn a master’s degree and Ph.D. in soil science from NCSU, with another master’s in statistics from Utah State in between. She went to Utah with her husband, an Air Force pilot, and decided to return to the Triangle and N.C. State after he died in 1983.

It was then that she really began to spend more time in Umstead. She loves the tree-covered hills and valleys, especially those spots where the traffic noise falls away and you can hear only birds, wind through the trees or the murmur of a creek.

“You can get away from the whole hectic world,” she says. “It’s basically a sanctuary.”

The unofficial trail along the Odd Fellows property line leads to such a spot, where Crabtree Creek passes through a narrow valley thick with trees. Spooner followed it one morning this winter, careful to stay on the right side of the “No trespassing” signs that Wake Stone has tacked to trees all along the boundary.

“You can see these hills,” she said, pointing toward the Odd Fellows forest. “Well they’ll all be gone and you’ll be able to see right to I-40 and the Cary sewage treatment plant.”

Spooner, 69, has been chair of the Umstead Coalition since the 1990s. Besides trying to save the park from what it sees as threats, the coalition supports it with money and labor on projects such as planting trees and gardens, maintaining trails, restoring some of the park’s historic buildings and putting solar panels on the roof of the visitors center.

Spooner, who retains the accent of her native Rochester, New York, knows Wake Stone’s mining proposal in detail. As she picks her way along the trail, she points to the spot near a creek where the company’s proposed sound wall will end and a chain-link fence will begin. She says the company’s studies have cited different numbers for how many trucks will be hauling stone from the site across the creek.

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