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With his untamed gray hair, full beard and stocky tree trunk of a frame, he appears more Jeremiah Johnson come down the mountain than Dr. It really is a pretty important part of your life.”Ĭonjure an oil painting of a man called “the Riverkeeper,” and it surely resembles Fannon. “Don’t ignore it just because you can’t see it. “You are nothing more than a vessel for hauling around part of the Yadkin River for a few years,” he adds, one of his many deadpan quips. That means if you live and eat and drink at Wake Forest, “you are, in fact, 70% Yadkin River,” Fannon says. Unlike rivers that gurgle through some cities, the Yadkin doesn’t impose itself on the daily landscape for most of the 800,000 to 1.6 million people it supports across North Carolina and South Carolina.įannon points out that the human body is about 70% water. But townsfolk in Winston-Salem tend to forget about the Yadkin or never learn its charms, Fannon says, because it’s 15 miles away.

Many Deacons remember the Yadkin for annual wacky rafting races and beer-filled afternoons floating on the shallow river. He relishes these times when he can leave behind the computer and the phone for a serene day on the stream, where living trees reach into the sky and fallen ones form ghostly gray sculptures along the banks. He and Executive Director Edgar Miller work with state officials, developers, landowners and farmers to protect the watershed and wildlife from runoff and pollution. He takes samples and tests the river regularly. It’s the water source for Winston-Salem and most of central North Carolina.

He has set up the trip to share his work and the river’s history with Wake Forest Magazine.įannon’s job with the Yadkin Riverkeeper nonprofit is to monitor and help sustain the quality of the Yadkin-Pee Dee River Basin. “It looks like the water might be down enough for us to go paddling,” Fannon says. It’s the best kind of day for Brian Fannon (’89), who holds the romantic title of Yadkin Riverkeeper. This is a good day, pleasantly cool, to paddle the Yadkin River, to see herons and mink and the banks of Roundabout Farm, settled by a Revolutionary War hero. Five miles ahead, down Red White and Blue Road, lies a put-in for kayaks and canoes. It does not store any personal data.Fog hovers in the valleys and curls around the low mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina, on a mid-September morning. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category 'Performance'. This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category 'Other. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category 'Necessary'.

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