The Westmoreland Conservation District is offering a day-long bus tour of Westmoreland County’s central watershed – the Sewickley Creek Watershed – on September 26.

The Sewickley Creek Watershed encompasses 168 square miles of Westmoreland County, including high forested ridges, gently rolling farmland, and one of the county’s busiest commercial corridors.

The Conservation District’s bus tour will follow a route water takes as it flows through the watershed, beginning on Chestnut Ridge…continuing southwest through active farmland and recreation areas…and then passing through the highly commercial and trafficked borough of New Station and areas of past and present natural-resource extraction before emptying into the Youghiogheny River, Pennsylvania’s 2008 River of the Year.

More specifically, the watershed includes: all of New Stanton, Youngwood, South Greensburg, Southwest Greensburg, Madison, Arona and Hunker boroughs; all of Sewickley Township; part of Hempfield, Unity, East Huntingdon, North Huntingdon, South Huntingdon, and Mount Pleasant townships; and part of the City of Greensburg.

The Department of Conservation and Natural Resources selected the Yough for this designation to “recognize the watershed’s shift from a threatened past to a promising recreational future.”

During the tour, the Conservation District staff will illustrate how past and present activities in the Sewickley Creek Watershed – timber-harvesting, farming, urban development, and natural-resource extraction – ultimately affect the quality of the Yough River, for better and worse.

Tour stops include: Saint Boniface Woods, Friendship Farms, Mammoth Park, New Stanton Borough, a private farm with a newly drilled natural-gas well, and the innovative Lowber abandoned-mine-drainage cleanup site.

The tour begins at the Westmoreland Conservation District, 218 Donohoe Road, Greensburg, at 8:30 a.m. and will return there by approximately 2:45 p.m.

Financial and other support for this project is provided by the Pennsylvania Association of Conservation Districts through its education grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection under Section 319 of the Clean Water Act, administered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The $20 fee includes lunch and bus tour transportation from and to the Westmoreland Conservation District.

Space is limited and registration is required. Contact Christie at 724-837-5271 ext. 210, or send email to: christie@wcdpa.com by September 17 to make reservations.

8/15/2008