An Impaired Watershed
Located in the critical Mitchell Creek watershed and just a few miles south of downtown Traverse City, Mitchell Creek Meadows: The Don and Jerry Oleson Nature Preserve is the perfect place to advance stewardship and protect the region’s significant natural, scenic, and farm lands. Once an abandoned golf course under threat of massive development, this ecologically significant property was protected with a generous gift from Don and Jerry Oleson.
Critical for people and wildlife, the Mitchell Creek watershed is the third largest watershed that flows into Grand Traverse Bay and covers roughly 15 square miles in parts of Garfield, East Bay, and Blair townships and Traverse City. Its waters flow into East Bay—the source of Traverse City’s drinking water— and support valuable habitat for trout and other aquatic species, although this habitat’s quality has declined in recent years.
Because much of the watershed lies within one of our region’s most urbanized landscapes, significant runoff from human activities like fertilization, erosion, and other contaminants have degraded this precious source of fresh water, causing the EPA to list the watershed as impaired.
Many of these human activities have also led to the removal or modification of wetlands, open fields, and other natural systems that serve the vital role of filtering surface runoff and keeping our waters clean. Since settlement, nearly half of the watershed’s wetland cover has been lost.