Six sites are monitored on these two watersheds in the northeastern part of the county. This region is largely rural and has been cleared and farmed for many years. Much of the area is pasture land, often on very steep slopes. In more recent years, some of the areea has been gradually changing over to more remote residential development. The region lies on the western slopes of the Newfound Mountains and its history, topology, land use patterns, and water quality are similar to the northeastern region of Buncombe County which lies on the eastern slopes of this chain. The major difference between the two is that Buncombe County has experienced much more extensive development in recent years.

There are two sites on Rush Fork, three on Fines Creek, and one on Cove Creek, a tributary of Fines Creek. The site on Cove Creek and the most upstream site on Fines Creek were added in March, 2000 to try to pinpoint some of the sources of pollutants that have been noted in this watershed in previous years of monitoring. These six sites show some of the most significant sedimentation and nutrient loading problems of the Haywood County VWIN monitoring sites.

Four of the six sites, Rush Fork downstream at Crabtree, Cove Creek, and Fines Creek midstream and downstream, rank poor. The other two sites, Rush Fork upstream and Fines Creek upstream, rank below average. Erosion and runoff are clearly major problems in this region. Five of the six sites monitored fall in the bottom 15% of all VWIN sites in the region on the sediment index. Four of the six sites monitored fall in the bottom 30% on the nutrient index and three of the six fall in the bottom 33% on the metals index. In general, the upstream sites are more heavily impacted by sediment and the downstream sites are more heavily impacted by nutrients and metals. Erosion rates are higher in the steep, upper parts of these watersheds, but some of the sediment settles into the stream bed in the lower parts of the watersheds. Bank erosion is very likely also a major source of sediment as large portions of the stream banks lack buffer zones.

In the Rush Fork watershed the problems are more complex. While the upstream site exhibits more chronic stream sedimentation, the downstream site has the highest overall nutrient concentrations (lowest score on the nutrient index) of any site in the VWIN monitoring region in Western North Carolina. At this site nutrient concentrations can be high both during storm flow and during dry weather. Nitrogen concentrations are much higher than average for the region which is often an indicator of animal waste entering the stream. As high concentrations occur during both base and storm flow, the origin is probably from both point and non-point sources.