To understand the Catawba River and why our future depends on it, you must first hike up an old wagon trail through the Blue Ridge Mountains, push past brambles and over fallen limbs, then scramble down a hillside deep within a hollow.
We tend to view it in pieces, or perhaps as a string of dammed-up lakes.
Nowhere along the Catawba River does the debate over the land stir such passion as on Lake James.
I wondered how Lake Norman got to be the Catawba's most developed lake, so Rick Howard took me on a tour of his past and future.
Sitting in the bow of a motorboat anchored near a cove in Charlotte's reservoir, I could easily imagine how we might one day run out of clean water.
If Lake Wylie were a bathtub, Carol Butler's shoreline would be the scummy ring around it. Each time high water recedes, her woodsy lot becomes a lakefront landfill.
If you paddle south of Wylie Dam, it's easy to imagine what the ancient Indians saw along the river that shares their name.
I stood on the dam that a century ago captured the wild Catawba River and put it to work. Great Falls wants its mojo back. It's looking -- where else? -- to the river.
The day I explored Lake Wateree, the temperature rose to 102 degrees back in Charlotte, and despite a breeze, it felt nearly that hot on the water's edge.
The Catawba River, beset by growing water demand, drought and what critics say are failed policies to protect it, is the nation's most endangered river, an environmental group says.
Elected leaders from Mecklenburg and York counties vowed Thursday to help protect the Catawba River, which an environmental group has dubbed America's most endangered river.
