MIAMI TOWNSHIP, Ohio — Walking through tall grass near what used to be a cart path, Jessica Spencer warns me about sinkholes. Her colleague is looking for poison ivy.
Spencer is the director of natural resources for Hamilton County Great Parks, and she wants to show me how construction crews buried more than a mile of streams in culvert pipes underneath an old golf course in Miami Township.
“You up for a hike?”
When we're done, Spencer says she’ll need to check me for ticks.
Almost four decades ago, construction equipment reshaped 150 acres of property that would become the Shawnee Lookout Golf Course. The course closed in 2019, but Spencer says changing the natural streams led to erosion and is still causing water quality problems.
“A place like this was not a good spot to put a golf course," said Devin Schenk, the Ohio mitigation program manager for the Nature Conservancy. “A lot of ecological damage happened here."
Schenk would know. He used to play the course growing up.
Take a tour of the closed golf course in the video below:
We walk down what used to be a fairway. There’s a ball lodged into the bank of a stream, one of the only ones that wasn't disturbed. Water flows into a culvert pipe as big as me. Eventually, Schenk tells me, it all flows into the Great Miami River.
“It impacts everything downstream,” Schenk said.
And it’s why the conservation group is working to bring other streams back above ground. It’s part of a massive project to turn the area into a nature sanctuary.
“We’re going to remove the pipes," Spencer said. "Bring the water to the surface and reconnect it to the floodplain.”
The stream restoration is being funded by the nature conservancy. Spencer says the property will be protected from future development through an agreement with the conservancy. The two organizations will partner to plant trees, construct new walking trails and a new nature center.
“It’s really a message of hope and rejuvenation,” Schenk said.
The stream restoration should be completed this fall, officials say. Other work will continue into next year.
