Whitewater Rafting on West Virginia's New and Gauley Rivers

by Jay Young

  National Park Service Collection.

  Bateaux were typically captained and crewed by slaves. More than one amateur historian theorizes that this may be due to the extreme danger of poling and sweeping such a behemoth, loaded with a few tons of tobacco and maybe a cow or two, through whitewater.

  As any modern boatman or boatwoman on the New River can attest, the river’s surface in a rapid has a topography to it that virtually never allows a straight line sixty feet long. The water slips over rocks and around bends, creating waves and troughs, pillows and hydraulics. Therein lies the genius of a boat that was otherwise utterly unsuited to the Lower New River Gorge—it flexes to absorb some of the roiling geometry of the river.

  Still, a bateau in the Lower Gorge is virtually a recipe for disaster. Bateaumen needed a level of skill that probably hasn’t been seen on the New River since. Raft guides may disagree, but the difference between paddling an inflated rubber tube and a sixty-foot collection of planks cannot be slight.

  Nevertheless, it’s obvious from Marshall and company’s River Commission Report that the water level in the New River ended up being mostly to their liking, especially when compared to the Greenbrier.

  Eventually, Marshall made it to Kanawha (ken-AW) Falls, where he and his party left their boat and traveled home.

  Marshall’s expedition was the first in recorded history to successfully navigate the entire New River Gorge by boat. Travel on the New River, however, dates farther back than Europeans in America, when native tribes plied its waters above and below the gorge. It may be that Native Americans did run the Lower Gorge, but there is understandably no recorded evidence to support this. And indeed, some Native Americans called the New River Mondongachate (mon-DON-ga-cha-TEH), which, loosely translated, means “River of Death.”

  Throughout most of the 1800s, bateaux plied the New River above and below the Lower Gorge, and a few times, a daring expedition would make its way into the canyon. In each instance, such expeditions undertook survey operations. But gradually, the objects of such surveys turned from canals and waterway travel to a railroad. During those years, nothing was organized to improve the New River.

  Then war again came to the New River Valley. At the start of the Civil War, Confederate troops moved into the area, and development of the New River as a military supply line became a priority. Confederate major Thomas L. Brown led the effort to improve the river, but it’s not clear that his efforts ever reached the Lower Gorge. By the time the war was over, many of the improvements the Confederacy was able to complete had been washed away.

  Halfhearted and ill-fated attempts to improve the New River, including for steamboat travel, continued for some time, but none amounted to anything other than upgrades that were relatively small scale when compared to Washington and Marshall’s grand vision, and none was in the formidable Lower Gorge.

  After the war, work resumed on the railroad. Money, however, was in short supply, and the Chesapeake & Ohio (C&O) Railway asked C.P. Huntington, who had just completed the first transcontinental railway, the Central Pacific, to finance the project. Before agreeing to do so, Huntington wanted to see the route for himself, so in 1869, he set off to do just that. From Hinton to Hawk’s Nest, his voyage was entirely by bateau.

  William and Joe Hinton and a third man named Parker Adkins hired themselves out to guide the boat. The trip was successful, and Huntington must have been sufficiently impressed. Shortly after, surveyors arrived to thoroughly map out the line, and work on the C&O Railway began in earnest.

  For a while, railroad builders employed bateaux to assist, but the practice was abandoned quickly. It was simply too dangerous in the Lower Gorge. “Since the building of the railroad was begun,” wrote Charles Nordhoff in 1871, “several men have been drowned in the river; and lately all the boats on the lower part have been destroyed by the contractors who at first used them, because they found their use too dangerous to life.”

  Shortly after the railroad was complete, in his Scribner’s Monthly article “New Ways in the Old Dominion” (1873), Jed Hotchkiss further described the strange relationship between railroad and bateaux. “Two years ago it was impossible to even ride through the long cañon on horseback,” he wrote. “And the only way in which it could be seen was by means of the long, narrow, arrowy batteaux, and their skillful masters even at times hesitated to shoot the more impetuous rapids. [For the surveyors] hanging from cliffs eighty or a hundred feet above the water, batteaux [sic] were in most cases useless.”

  “When the contractors went to work,” Hotchkiss continued,

  they, of course, needing larger quantities of supplies, employed the river boats to bring them; but even they had to transport everything from a few landings, on horse’s backs; they brought boats, and used them until several men were drowned; and so treacherous is the river that it was presently found necessary to absolutely forbid the men to bathe in it.

  There is little, if any, evidence to suggest that anybody ran the Lower Gorge at all immediately after the C&O was complete. Why on earth would they risk life, limb and cargo to move a ton of tobacco in those treacherous waters when they could more easily drop twenty times that into a railroad car?

  It is possible, but exceptionally unlikely given the deaths on the river during railroad construction, that whitewater tourism actually has its roots in that time. One passage in particular in Hotchkiss’s article may support this. If not, it certainly is startling in its accuracy:

  The adventurous and enterprising tourist, if hereafter there shall remain such a being, may make the tour of the New River cañon; as voyages by canoe are just now fashionable, we do not doubt that some romantic voyagers will make this attempt. They are hereby warned that it is an exciting and in some parts even perilous passage, through a long succession of rapids, for which even the passenger needs good nerves.

  Of course, modern raft runs would be vastly different from an early bateau survey expedition in more ways than just the boat. In fact, those expeditions, which typically followed the river past its confluence with the Gauley, were the only since—and possibly forever more—to run every rapid in the Lower Gorge.

  A typical Lower New River run today ends at Fayette Station or continues another mile-plus to Teay’s Landing. Boaters thereby take out before having to stroke through the oceanic expanse of Hawk’s Nest Lake. That reservoir formed behind the Hawk’s Nest Dam, which workers completed for hydroelectric power in the 1930s. Along with the dam, Union Carbide bore a tunnel through Gauley Mountain to divert the New River through the plant to a point three miles downstream.

  That tunnel is synonymous with the worst industrial disaster in American history. Though Union Carbide eventually admitted to 109 worker deaths from inhaling silicon dust, a congressional hearing determined that the number killed was actually 476. Even that, however, is almost definitely an understatement. Many of the nearly 3,000 workers traveled to West Virginia for the job and then left upon falling sick, so it’s impossible to determine exactly how many died. Some estimates are closer to one-third of all workers.

  The much lesser issue of Hawk’s Nest Dam—the one that concerns modern boaters—is twofold.

  First, the diverted water left behind a drained section of riverbed forever to be known as the Dries. Hawk’s Nest Dam occasionally releases water into the Dries, but only when the volume becomes high enough that the tunnel can’t keep up with it. When that happens, boaters flock to the Dries. But at all other times, it’s quite…dry.

  The second minor tragedy is that the reservoir behind the dam quickly flooded over every rapid in that section of river, never to be seen or run again. No descriptions of those rapids exist, so it’s impossible to know what’s there. But considering the quality of whitewater above and below Hawk’s Nest Lake and Dam, it’s easy to imagine a magnificent section of challenging water, much like the rest of the Lower Gorge.

  Evidence to the contrary is in short supply, and many historians consider the last complete bateau
x run through the Lower New River Gorge to be C.P. Huntington’s railroad survey in 1869. If that’s true, then apparently it was eighty-eight years before anybody ran it again.

  Bob “Dog” Underwood worked for Wildwater Unlimited Expeditions and was one of the first professional raft guides to ply the Lower New River. He grew up at the top of the Lower Gorge in a town called Thurmond, and he remembers attempts on the Lower Gorge being few and far between. “Occasionally, growing up I would see a canoe or two go by, maybe an old army raft,” he recounted. “But it was maybe once in two, three years, something like that. I had seen some of them go and never saw them again, and I had seen some of them walk out again without their equipment.”

  Underwood, a lifelong West Virginian, had himself made a few tentative, ill-fated forays downstream. He was ten years old in 1953 when he and some friends made their first attempt at the Lower Gorge on a homemade raft, a basic wooden rectangle about ten feet long and two feet wide. “We’d get old boards from some of the old buildings and build a little raft or boat, and run it as far as we could,” said Underwood. “Usually it was low water, so we didn’t run any big stuff. We’d run far enough to be interesting, and then we’d let the boats go and walk back.”

  “We would carry inner tubes with us,” he continued. “That was our life jacket. If something happened, we’d hang on to the inner tube, let the boat go and swim to shore.”

  In 1957, John Berry and Bob Harrigan were at the cutting edge of American paddling. The two men initiated decked boating in America when they stretched a tarp over the gunwales of an open canoe, and they even designed an early C2 (a kayak-like, two-person canoe). Many boaters credit Berry with the first ever Eskimo roll of a C2’s smaller cousin, a C1.

  Together, Barry and Harrigan pioneered run after run on mid-Atlantic rivers, including sections of the Youghiogheny River in Pennsylvania and the Cheat River in West Virginia. True to form, they also teamed up Labor Day Weekend in 1957 to run the New River from Thurmond to Fayette Station. Not much is known about the water level that day, but it’s difficult for a modern raft guide to imagine the run being too gnarly at that time of year.

  Twenty miles up the road, another river coursed along a tight gorge. Of smaller volume, but steeper descent in a tighter channel, the Gauley patiently awaited its own first descent.

  Though West Virginia is known mainly for its vast coal resources, if you look far enough back in its history, say to the late 1700s and early 1800s, you’ll also find a thriving salt industry. Such an industry created a demand for other natural resources, most notably—insofar as Gauley River boaters are concerned—wood. The coal boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s powered the Industrial Revolution, but it also upped the demand for wood to a frenzied level. The coal industry needed homes, churches, barns and company buildings by the thousands, and the Gauley River had wood aplenty to supply them.

  Soon, a bona fide wood rush of the Gauley and Meadow Rivers was on. The year 1883 saw the first big log drive on the Gauley River, and by 1885, the timber industry was in full swing. As loggers hewed their way up the Gauley from its confluence with the New River, a typical log’s watery journey grew longer and longer. The Gauley, however, would not cooperate easily. Downstream of what modern boaters consider to be “the Gauley,” the federal government sponsored the digging of a one-hundred-foot-wide channel through which to float logs, but timber companies still needed more. At some point in the 1880s, timber companies began to dynamite sluices where large ledges wouldn’t permit logs to pass. Lost Paddle, Iron Ring and Sweet’s Falls are just three of the rapids that exist as they are today, not due to nature’s entropic march, but because men packed them full of dynamite and blew them to bits.

  Like the rapids buried forever under the surface of Hawk’s Nest Lake on the New River, we’ll never know what the dynamited ledges of the Gauley River looked like or whether whitewater rafting as an industry would have been viable on them.

  Some may say that rafts would have been impractical on a ledge-filled river with the volume and gradient of the Gauley, especially in the case of Lost Paddle, but the point is academic. Ledges were sliced into sluices, and eventually the rafts came.

  Interlude

  BROKEN ROSE

  The bateau Rose of Nelson was in trouble. Broached as it was against the rocks in the middle of a Class-IV rapid called Dudley’s Dip in the Lower Gorge of the New River, it took on water about as quickly as one might expect of a forty-three-and-a-half-foot-long wooden bucket.

  Its crew tried valiantly to bail it. They heaved water from the Rose’s hull into the river like a bucket brigade dowsing a fire, but to no avail. Within moments, the bateau tipped upstream and exposed its innards to the rushing torrent. Pinned and swamped, it flexed around the rocks. It held for a brief second, which to its crew must have seemed like an hour, and then finally fell apart, sending splintered wood and the crew into the drink.

  The year was 2004.

  In 2003, to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the New River Gorge National River, the Park Service organized a reenactment of C.P. Huntington’s 1869 voyage.

  At the time of the reenactment, however, the New River ran at flood levels. The water gauge at Fayette Station read twenty feet. Contrary to popular belief, neither the NPS nor the industry as a whole dictates a “cutoff” level past which no commercial rafting will occur, but a relatively low twelve feet, which is itself a huge volume of water, is the unofficial guideline. Before it even reached the Lower Gorge, the Rose of Nelson braved standing waves up to seven feet tall with little to protect it but a six-inch bulkhead its builders installed to help it shed water. Against waves that large, though, the bulkheads did little, and the boat swamped regularly.

  Every night and often throughout each day, the Rose eddied out for repairs. Its crew pounded cotton into the spaces between planks in a futile effort to keep the river out of the boat. When camping at night, they purposely swamped the bateau to keep its boards swollen and tight.

  But as it approached the town of Thurmond, everybody aboard the Rose had the same thought: “There’s no way we’ll make it through the Lower Gorge.” Prudence won the day, and instead of trying, the team removed the Rose from the water and dried it out for a rain date with the New River.

  That day finally arrived a year later, when the Rose again put in at Thurmond and headed into the gorge. The first half of the journey from Thurmond to Fayette Station is relatively calm. There is only one significant rapid, a Class III called Surprise, and the Rose of Nelson made it through easily to the delight of everybody aboard.

  The Rose of Nelson hits the hole in Surprise rapid on the Lower New River during a 2004 NPS bateau reenactment. Captain Mike Neal of the Virginia Canal Society works the stern sweep, while Dewey Wood, who died tragically in a 2007 shooting, mans the bow. National Park Service Collection.

  Though they had to stop often to effect repairs, the crew of the Rose watched rapid after rapid disappear around the bends behind them. One of those is a rapid called Lower Keeney. Together with Upper and Middle Keeney Rapids, Lower Keeney forms one of two Class-V drops, but only at higher water levels when they blend into one long flume. That day, the New River flowed low enough to give it a go.

  Deftly, the crew maneuvered the Rose of Nelson to river left (the left side of the river as a boater faces downstream) in the calm pool above Lower Keeney. Once lined up for the rapid, they paused to let the river push them where they needed to be. They hovered over the entrance to the drop and took in the roiling path stretched out below. Both banks were lined with spectators cheering them on.

  The Rose dove into the first waves, and the bateau flexed and bent to absorb the rise and fall of the river. In a moment that passed all too quickly, it was through. The crowd erupted in cheers.

  Next up, the crew knew, would be Dudley’s Dip, a rocky dogleg left. Dudley’s is a wide-open green highway at some water levels but would be steeper and more difficult that day, so the crew eddied out once agai
n for repairs. They spent hours plugging leaks, sometimes with people in the water with masks and snorkels trying to locate the many tiny gaps that had developed throughout the day.

  Cliff Bobinski of the NPS deals with the aftermath of the 2004 bateau reenactment. National Park Service Collection.

  Finally, with the boat as plugged as it could be, they pushed off and headed downstream.

  Cliff Bobinski, a ranger working out of the Glen Jean Park Headquarters, rowed up alongside the bateau, running safety for the crew in case the worst happened. Bobinski recommended a clean line to them. “Enter right of center,” he advised. “And then turn back left with the current to split the difference between two rocks.” He watched in horror, however, as the boat floated exactly the opposite way, entering too far left. Instead of turning left with the current, the panicked crew forced the bateau right—broadside to the current—which swept it against the rocks.

  The event marked the sudden end of the reenactment, which was itself historic. Bobinski spent the rest of the afternoon and much of the next day picking up pieces of the Rose of Nelson.

  THE RODMAN EXPEDITION

  Perhaps fittingly for the most challenging big-water river in its region, the Gauley did not give up its first descent easily. It fought kicking and screaming by nature of its difficulty and its obscurity relative to the New River.

  Tucked away in a winding, inaccessible gorge, the Gauley flowed unknown to all but local non-boaters and fishermen until well into the 1950s, when Ray Moore of Alexandria, Virginia, found it. In 1959, he invited a few friends from the Washington, D.C. area, plus two from Pittsburgh, to attempt a run.

  One of those Pittsburgh paddlers was Sayre Rodman. Rodman and his wife, Jean, were accomplished rafters and apprentices to Moore. “He taught Jean and me what he knew about rafts, short-fused dynamite sticks, and other subjects where one should pay close attention,” Rodman wrote in the April 1987 edition of the Highlands Voice, a newsletter that the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy publishes monthly. (I actually stumbled across a reprinting of that article by Dave Elkinton, also in the Highlands Voice, this time in December 2006.)