Whitewater Rafting on West Virginia's New and Gauley Rivers

by Jay Young

  “Here’s the bottom line: no question it’s a better mouse trap,” declared Arnold about self-bailing rafts. “Nobody with any brains would argue any differently. I can’t imagine somebody arguing it.”

  As had happened with paddle boats and oar rigs, what the public wanted, the public got. “People said, I’m not running with you unless I’m in a self-bailer,” said Proctor. “We were adding self-bailers each year, little bit by little bit. Then in ’91, we said, ‘Let’s just convert this year.’ We bought $150,000 in boats that one year and became all self-bailing. Once people had that taste, they didn’t want to go back to a bucket boat.”

  PROTECTED WATER

  The history of how the New River Gorge became a National River is both long and complicated, but thankfully, it is already well documented by the National Park Service in its New River Gorge National River Administrative History. What follows is an abridged version.

  The story, which contains far more wrangling of politicians and activists in meeting halls and Congress than it does whitewater, is as long as the river itself and begins as far back in time. The parts of it that concern whitewater rafting in the New River Gorge, however, probably began in 1962.

  In that year, Appalachian Electric Power (AEP) applied to the Federal Power Commission (FPC) for a preliminary permit to study the feasibility of building a dam on the New River at the Virginia–North Carolina border. In 1965, with the study concluded, the FPC granted AEP a permit to build a two-dam hydroelectric and pumped storage facility there. Residents in and around the immediate vicinity felt that such a project represented progress and raised little objection to it. What little opposition appeared was largely ignored until 1966, when the Department of the Interior (DOI) jumped into the fray. Charged at the time with cleaning up the nation’s waterways, the DOI felt that such a facility’s storage capacity would not allow it to augment flows downstream to dilute chemicals spilled into the Kanawha River, of which the New River is a tributary. The DOI won its argument in FPC hearings, but instead of shutting the project down, the ruling spurred AEP on to double the size of its planned facility.

  The size of the project alarmed North Carolina residents, who leapt into action to fight it. Authors of arguments, studies and political ploys jockeyed for position for years against the authors of arguments to the contrary, conflicting studies and counter ploys. The West Virginia Highlands Conservancy jumped in to lend its support against the project in 1969, and finally, in 1970, residents of Raleigh, Fayette and Summers Counties, through which the New River Gorge slices, sat up and took notice. Lifelong New River Valley residents argued that the project upstream would forever alter their beloved river, and the owner of a fledgling whitewater rafting company, Jon Dragan, felt it would destroy the business he was trying to build.

  Opponents of the project saw an opening. In 1968, Congress had passed the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. What if, they reasoned, they could win federal protection for the New River under that act? Those efforts faltered at first, until, in 1974, Senators Sam Ervin and Jesse Helms of North Carolina managed to introduce a study on the feasibility of adding the New River to the Wild and Scenic River System.

  Support from many surprising parties swelled, including nearly every concerned party in West Virginia, and finally, the governor of North Carolina applied directly to the DOI for Wild and Scenic status. Secretary of the Interior Thomas Kleppe granted it for a large section of the New River in North Carolina in 1976, but the battle there was not over.

  A court of appeals quickly stayed that determination and granted the FPC permission to continue with the AEP project. The decision was a slap in the face to the project’s opponents, but it also jolted them into further action. CBS, ABC and NBC all reported on the battle, and the New River became a national-level issue. Environmentalists invited members of Congress on canoe trips on the river, and simple farmers became lobbyists. As 1975 rolled into 1976, more than one hundred newspapers across the country had written editorials in opposition to the project. The federal government could no longer ignore the immensity of opposition. Both the House and Senate passed bills to declare the North Carolina section of the New River Wild and Scenic, and finally, on September 1976, President Ford signed it into law.

  West Virginia’s New River, however, was still largely unprotected. Spurred on by the success in North Carolina, West Virginia citizens and politicians redoubled their efforts. Not content with Wild and Scenic status, they decided that a National Park was more appropriate. With support from all quarters, including the state government, citizenry and the Fayette Plateau Chamber of Commerce, they progressed and faltered, progressed and faltered.

  Finally, activists and politicians hit on the idea of a National River designation for the New River. There was precedent for such a designation in the Ozarks and on the Buffalo River, and they felt it would put the New River under the umbrella of the National Park Service Organic Act of 1916. Proponents of protection for the New River loved the idea, and in 1978, President Carter signed the bill that created the New River Gorge National River and placed it forever under the protection of the National Park Service.

  The most intimidating put-in there ever was: the Upper Gauley. From the moment paddles hit the water, it was on. Whitewater Photography.

  One of that bill’s proponents was a freshman congressman from Beckley, West Virginia. Nick Rahall had been active in various civic clubs since high school and was already heavily in favor of protecting the New River Gorge when he took office. He would go on to play an instrumental role in similar designation for the Gauley River, where whitewater rafting began as a casual affair.

  In 1966, the Army Corps of Engineers completed the Summersville Dam and flooded the section of the Gauley River that Sayre and Jean Rodman ran on their way downstream to rapids that would eventually attract millions of visitors. Sayre described his feelings about the dam: “You will never see that run, nor will your children. When next you feel grateful for a scheduled release from the Summersville Dam, think of the once free-flowing riverbed, down in the mud under the lake. We delighted in running it, a quarter of a century ago. The dam builders took something very special from you.”

  (A funny little story sheds light on the naming of the Summersville Dam, which broke the corps’ long-standing tradition of naming dams and reservoirs after flooded towns. In this case, that town was Gad, West Virginia. They opted pretty quickly against the name “Gad Dam.”)

  Nevertheless, as far as the corps was concerned, boaters were welcome on the river. They simply didn’t care what went on downstream of their dam.

  And indeed, the local men who worked at the dam had a relaxed relationship with boaters, both private and commercial. Paul Breuer made friends with a dam employee named Jack Dorsey, who warmed up easily to a fresh cup of coffee. Breuer rolled up to the dam one morning and, coffee in hand, introduced himself to Dorsey and said, “Hey what’s going on? We’re new in town and just trying to understand all this and how it works.”

  The resulting relationship would prove beneficial to boating, as Breuer continued to approach Dorsey on subsequent occasions to ask for more water. “We would call up and say, ‘Hey Jack, looks like it’s about two thousand cfs. We’d sure like twenty-eight hundred,’” recalled Breuer.

  “Yeah,” Jack often responded, “I can handle that for you.”

  That relationship, however, was not to last.

  In 1981, the Army Corps of Engineers announced its intention to build a long-tunnel hydroelectric project at the Summersville Dam. Its proposal was to pipe water from the lake three miles downhill and into a hydroelectric generator and then release it back into the Gauley River. The bottom line for boaters was that the project would have dewatered the first three miles of the Gauley.

  A club of private boaters, the West Virginia Wildwater Association (WVWA), was the first to spring into action. Kim and Aggie Casto were two WVWA members who met through the organization and became key members of an activist group tha
t soon spun off with its own nonprofit status. Together with Ed Rhett, Chris Dragan of Wildwater Unlimited, Don Weidemann, Paul Breuer of Mountain River Tours, Pope Barrow, Steve Taylor, Dave Brisell and Charlie Walbridge, they called themselves Citizens for the Gauley River (CFGR).

  CFGR undertook a wide range of grassroots activism, including driving around the countryside in a pickup truck with signs and simply speaking to people to educate them about the corps’ intentions. They sold T-shirts and started the Gauley Festival to raise money. One early Gauley Festival poster had a corps employee in a military uniform stylized as an evil giant with his hand on the valve, while tiny kayakers cowered in the background. An estimated two to three thousand people attended that festival, and the CFGR folk were blown away by the support. “Gauley Festival was so successful as a fundraiser,” said Kim Casto, “that AWA [American Whitewater Association, now shortened to American Whitewater] took it over after we were done.” That festival continues annually as Gauley Fest.

  In the beginning, however, CFGR was alone in the wilderness, a tiny, quiet voice versus the United States Army. The corps did not view downstream recreation as any of its business. Instead, the corps maintained, its project purposes were low-flow augmentation and flood control.

  Surprisingly, even the rafting companies didn’t seem all that interested in joining the effort to fight the long-tunnel project. The corps had told them that the project would be good for their businesses, and some reluctantly agreed.

  “We thought, okay, we can’t just be a bunch of river runners against this project,” said Aggie Casto. “It was crucial that we have the outfitters. They had a huge amount of clout.”

  “The corps was trying to convince them that they could make money off the project,” she continued. “We had to prove to them that they weren’t going to gain financially. Once we were able to do that, they were behind us.”

  There was more to the equation, however, than mere money.

  Jim Zoia is a longtime congressional aide who served under Nick Rahall as chief of staff of the House Natural Resources Committee. “At the time,” said Zoia, “the corps was blackmailing the outfitters into supporting the project.”

  Zoia does not use the term blackmail lightly. “It was happening! They basically were telling the outfitters—not in writing—but they were telling the outfitters that if you don’t back us on this long-tunnel proposal, then we’re not going to give you releases. They were releasing the water in the middle of the night!”

  It was a report by Steve Taylor of CFGR, a scientist with expertise in cost-benefit ratios and hydrology, that finally changed the outfitters’ minds. “The information was convincing enough to them that what the corps was telling them didn’t add up,” said Kim. “If he could not have convinced them, it would have been lost.” That report made it clear that the corps’ estimation of impact downstream was wildly incorrect and that a regular schedule of releases from the Summersville Dam was entirely capable of fulfilling the corps’ other project purposes.

  Lady Bird Johnson on the New River, 1976. Butch Christian Collection.

  With the outfitters on board, CFGR approached Jon Dragan to run the organization, but he felt that it needed somebody who could give it more time and who had more experience working against the Corps of Engineers.

  That person was David Brown, who at the time headed up EPRO, the Eastern Professional River Outfitters. Fresh off a major victory against a Tennessee Valley Authority hydroelectric project on the Ocoee River in southeastern Tennessee, Brown was eager to help.

  Under Brown, CFGR set about gaining the support of as many interested groups as possible and developing a strategy to overcome the corps’ belligerence. Miners were convinced that hydroelectric would displace coal jobs, so they joined the effort. Despite corps promises of a new trout fishery, anglers jumped on board as well. “I think they were catching pretty big trout under current conditions,” said Brown.

  “The Corps of Engineers had a public meeting at Nicholas County High School,” said Kim, “and the place was just packed. The majority of them were coal miners.”

  CFGR took on the role of primary opposition organizer. “We had to make sure,” said Aggie, “that there were letters and people against it over the course of time. That’s what we did.”

  The Fayette Plateau Chamber of Commerce, which recognized the Gauley River’s potential to drive economic development, soon joined the mix as well.

  However, “the thing that turned the tide,” said Brown, was when Steve Taylor presented his report to Assistant Secretary of the Army (Civil Works) William Gianelli, who had oversight of the corps. “Gianelli walked in,” said Brown, “and goes, ‘I know all about you whiteriver rafters.’” Nevertheless, Taylor’s report was indisputable, and in terms of regular releases, “the corps turned around 180 degrees as a result of that meeting.”

  On long-tunnel hydroelectric, however, the corps was still not moved.

  CFGR and outfitters were not without support in the federal government. “We recognized back then that this was not only an outstanding recreational resource but one which could contribute to the local economy,” said Zoia.

  Congressman Rahall was firmly on the side of CFGR and the outfitters. “In the Energy and Water Appropriations Act, that would have been 1985, I inserted a provision to make whitewater recreation on the Gauley River a project purpose of the Summersville Dam as administered by the Corps of Engineers,” he said. That bill passed and defeated the Summersville Dam long-tunnel proposal once and for all.

  To Kim and Aggie Casto, when victory finally happened, it came quickly and suddenly. “I don’t ever remember feeling good about it until it happened,” said Aggie. “We loved the river. And we were foolish enough to believe that our voices counted. Sometimes they just need to be the right voices, so we just worked at getting the right voices saying the same thing.”

  The 1985 provision was historic in that it was the first time whitewater recreation became an official Corps of Engineers project purpose. Rahall and crew followed it up with the Water Resources Development Act of 1986, which made the Gauley’s autumn water release schedule part of federal law. It’s still the schedule now, weekends only and during the day, also known as Gauley Season.

  Still, federal protection of the Gauley River was not a foregone conclusion for all time. Interested parties, including Congressman Rahall, recognized that there was still potential for other interests to threaten the Gauley. “We came to a point in 1987,” said Zoia, “where Congressman Rahall said we’ve got to put this to bed for good. And the way to do this is to designate it as a unit of the National Park System.” That philosophy gave rise to the West Virginia River Conservation Act of 1988, also known as the Gauley River Bill, to create the Gauley River National Recreation Area.

  Zoia and his team began to contact landowners about the federal government buying their property for the park. “They’re probably six big out-of-state corporate landowners in there,” he said. “One of them I tracked down was a little old lady in Pittsburgh. She was the last heir.” Most of the landowners were cooperative, and the Trust for Public Land bought up parcels and held them until the NPS could complete its purchases.

  Democracy in Action! The Army Corps announces a public meeting in regard to whitewater releases on the Gauley River. J. Young.

  “It was really amazing,” said Zoia. “There wasn’t a lot of opposition to it. I’ve dealt with park issues across the country, and here we were carving out a new unit of the National Park System from private land, and doing it with relatively little controversy.”

  By the time 1987 rolled around, and Congressman Rahall and others were moving to designate the Gauley as part of the National Park System, the corps had already changed its tune. “I watched the whole mindset of the corps change,” said Zoia. “They became cheerleaders! They would put out releases saying how many people were going down the river and how much money it generated to the local economy.”

  Of the Gaul
ey River Bill, “I recall that we had trouble getting Whitehouse approval,” said Congressman Rahall. Ronald Reagan was in the Whitehouse, and it was generally against Republican philosophy to expand such protected areas. “But we had a lot of local Republican support,” continued the congressman. “I recall specifically Knotts McConnell…who personally went to the Whitehouse, was a friend of Ronald Reagan’s and pleaded that he sign this into law.”

  That bill established the largest system of federally protected waterways east of the Mississippi.

  With President Reagan’s signing of the Gauley River Bill, the victory against the long tunnel was complete. That was not, however, the only story of political wrangling centered on the New and Gauley Rivers.

  There exists a subplot.

  It’s easy to paint a picture of diverse citizens meshing seamlessly to fight a perceived injustice. Some of the people involved, however, might take issue with the word “seamlessly.” In fact, there was some friction between the outfitters and some members of CFGR, and surprisingly, that friction centered not on the Gauley River but on the New. At the same time various parties negotiated over Gauley policy, the NPS and the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources, which had control over outfitter licensing and customer quotas, worked with user groups to decide what to do about an undeveloped put-in halfway between Thurmond and Fayette Station at Cunard.

  Outfitters wanted Cunard developed. “We were ready to close on all of the land at Cunard,” said Dave Arnold of Class-VI. “We could have bought it all, but James Carrico, the first superintendent, asked us not to. Our logic was this: we’ll buy enough to keep ourselves, which we still own today, and if we let the park have the rest of it, they’ll fix the road up. The road was unbelievably bad.”