by Jay Young
As February turned to March, the coalition had financing. They had the engineering and materials lined up. “We had everything in place except for one thing,” said Arnold, “permission from the railroad to go under.”
It was obviously in Wildwater’s interest to stop the coalition from building the tunnel, so Dragan hired a lobbyist to work on his company’s behalf.
“Jon tried to put extraordinary pressure on us,” said Arnold. He invited Arnold and Proctor down to Thurmond to talk—without the other coalition members. “Basically, he tried to leverage us to break the coalition.” Dragan told Arnold and Proctor that he would let Class-VI back in, even though they missed the February 1 cutoff. All they had to do was walk away from the other three outfitters. “It scared the hell out of Doug and I. I remember driving out, coming up Dun Loop; Doug and I were almost shaking.”
“We knew if we jumped ship, our fathers would kill us!” said Proctor.
The coalition in turn hired Arch Moore, a former and future West Virginia governor, to handle its legal work. The outfitters knew they needed a big gun, somebody who could call up CSX and get a face-to-face meeting with its president, John Snow (who would eventually become U.S. secretary of the treasury under George W. Bush). No mere river hippie could get an audience with Snow, so Moore’s main role was to negotiate with CSX. There were rumors that he was set to run for governor again, which couldn’t hurt matters.
The coalition knew that it was Snow, and nobody else, who had to make the call to shut down the track. Nobody below him would dare to make the decision, because if somebody said yes, his or her job would have been forfeit.
The clock ticked on, and the season loomed like an execution date, but the outfitters were committed. “We actually ordered the steel and had it delivered to the site,” said Arnold. “And the railroad freaked out. They said, ‘What are you doing!?’ We said, ‘You don’t understand, we have no choice. We’ve cut our ties.’”
“Our gamble was this: Would the state really let us go bankrupt? Would they really let four companies in a growth industry go down?”
Actually, there was little doubt that CSX would allow the work to happen. The question was how would they allow it to proceed? Would they allow an open cut, for which the track would have to be shut down, so the coalition could complete the job in one frenzied push? That’s certainly what the coalition wanted because it meant they could put the job behind them sooner and start running trips. Or was CSX going to tell them that they could only shut the track down for a few hours a day? The latter would have prolonged the project over the course of the summer, preventing any of the companies from running trips and likely spelling the demise of all four.
“We needed an open seventy-two-hour window,” said Proctor simply. But as opening weekend of raft season drew nigh—and tunnel construction weekend even more so—the team still didn’t have a yes from CSX.
Dave Arnold said, “I was in a meeting at the state DNR, and I knew that was the day Arch was going to have a heart-to-heart with Mr. Snow. In the meeting, I get handed a note from the secretary. It said, ‘The tunnel has been denied.’”
“That’s all it said. I’m sure I turned white and probably looked like I was about to vomit. It meant we were going down. The director of the DNR looked at me and said, ‘Dave, are you okay? Do we need to take a break?’”
Arnold called his partner, Jeff Proctor, and asked what was going on. “It doesn’t look good,” replied Proctor.
The conversation between Arch Moore and John Snow had been brief. During the meeting, Snow expressed his denial of permission to build the tunnel, to which Moore reportedly replied, “That’s fine, as long as you understand the score is CSX one, me nothing. Thanks for your time.” And he left.
Crestfallen and morose, Arnold went back into the meeting. Not that any of it mattered. With no permission to build the tunnel, his company was sunk anyway. However, “it wasn’t five minutes more,” he said, “the secretary comes up with another note, and it says, ‘The tunnel has been approved.’ I said, ‘I need to take another break.’”
Minutes after the meeting between Moore and Snow had concluded, and Moore had stalked out of the office angry, Snow called him back and reportedly said, “You know Arch, I’ve been thinking about it. We really don’t like that score. We’re going to give you the open trench. You’ve got seventy-two hours on Memorial Day Weekend.”
“So, we had seventy-two hours,” said Proctor. They pulled it off in fifty-six hours, working three shifts a day.
In their biggest years, fees paid to Wildwater for taking out at Fayette Station would have been in the neighborhood of $60,000 to $80,000 a year. “Hindsight says, it was probably stupid,” said Tom Dragan. “Hindsight says we should have charged two bucks a head and let them run as many people on the river as they wanted. We’d have made four times as much money and never had to run a raft trip.”
Tom Dragan, brother of the late Jon Dragan, stands next to the Thurmond Union Church, which served as the Wildwater offices for several years. J. Young.
Right or wrong, fair or unfair, however, Dragan’s fees were less about greed and more about encouraging what he felt was healthy pricing for the industry as a whole. By tying his fees to other companies’ rates, he could keep a handle on their prices, which he felt should remain low. “He used to say, ‘If everybody charged the same amount, then you wouldn’t have a problem,’” said Melanie Dragan.
At the time, there was also talk of upping the maximum number of people allowed to run the river per day, but Jon Dragan didn’t want those numbers to increase. He could block it simply by limiting the number of people he would let take out at Fayette Station. Even if the Dragans had kept Fayette Station fees low, Tom believes the coalition would still have built the Teay’s tunnel because his brother would never have yielded on that number.
“When they got the other side, their price structure [for other companies to take out] was identical to ours,” Tom pointed out. “They did the same thing we did, and nobody went over there because the prices were the same. Were our prices too high? For them they were. But when the shoe was on the other foot, it wasn’t as big a deal. And we did maintain that [maximum] number on the river until the Park Service bought us.”
Jon Dragan eventually sold Wildwater’s land at Fayette Station and the put-in at Stone Cliff above Thurmond to the National Park Service, and in so doing, he got the last word. Dragan made sure to include provisions in the sale to ensure that everybody who put in at Stone Cliff and took out at Fayette Station—including commercial outfitters—would always be able to do so, and now they pay nothing. “Here this conglomerate went and spent a million dollars on a tunnel,” laughed Melanie sweetly, “and now all these people could take out across the river for nothing.”
The lesson the industry learned as a whole, however, was more valuable than a hundred tunnels. “A light bulb went off,” said Proctor. “Long-term leases and especially owning property on and around the river was critical. It’s a real estate game.” They applied the lesson liberally on the New River and, just as importantly, on the Gauley.
MRT, for one, already owned land there. Early on, MRT was running trips on the Gauley on a regular basis, and when a plot of land, river left at Wood’s Ferry, came up for tax sale, it borrowed $1,000 from a local attorney to add to its own funds and snatched it up.
That property needed work over the course of years to be viable, however. The road was only graveled for a mile off the hard top of Saturday Road, and the rest of it was in terrible shape. “The road had slid in, and there was a log on one side that we had to walk over originally to get to the river,” said Breuer. “We used wheelbarrows to get our rafts down there.”
One Class-VI acquisition was a permanent right of way to access a natural gas pipeline at Panther Mountain, down which they slid their rafts to the river for a number of years. “In 1979, we were looking for a way to get on the Lower Gauley,” said Proctor, “and all of a sudden we go o
ut there and there’s this pipe. We used to blow our rafts up at the top, and we’re talking six hundred feet…we just set the rafts on the pipe and walked on down.”
“It worked remarkably well,” added Arnold. “To this day, if you cleared all the briars, you could do it, piece of cake.” Class-VI still owns a legal right to cross that property and access the pipe. “The gas company was really kind of glad because they had to go up and down that thing all the time. And we built the road—they could drive to the halfway point.”
They also still own a right of way to leap from Jump Rock. Think about that for a moment. A legal document filed in some rural courthouse somewhere actually says that Class-VI has a legal right to jump off a rock into the river.
Throughout the 1980s, Class-VI talked on and off about a land purchase with an owner called Mower Lumber. Mower owned a long tract that Class-VI wanted to buy, on river right of the Gauley from Meadow Creek at Sweet’s Falls to Bucklick Branch above Koontz Bend, but to no avail. In 1987, desperate to make payroll for an upcoming month, Mower contacted Dave Arnold out of the blue and offered the tract for sale.
The purchase, which they completed in partnership with Imre Szilagyi and Appalachian Wildwaters, allowed the two companies to build river access at Mason’s Branch and accomplish something they had dreamed about for years prior: splitting the formerly bisected Gauley River into thirds.
Before that purchase, there was the Upper Gauley and the Lower Gauley, and the takeout for the Upper was at Peter’s Creek. “That was a long first day,” said Arnold. Trisecting the river allowed them to run the “Middle” Gauley at low water in the summer, and also allowed them to adapt to high water. When heavy rains and snowmelt made the Upper Gauley too high for commercial trips, they could instead put in at Mason’s Branch.
Breuer and MRT had taught the Class-VI owners the value of the Lower Gauley at high water as well, which many boaters still believe is the best whitewater run in a region filled with world-class rivers. “We were driven as guides, not as businessmen, to figure out how to run the Lower Gauley at eight grand,” said Arnold.
Class-VI and AW went on to provide access at Bucklick, Mason’s Branch and Wood’s Ferry at river right to private boaters for twenty years. Mason’s Branch and Wood’s are now public property in the hands of the Park Service.
“Once we built Mason’s Branch,” said Arnold, “There was no way they were going back to Peter’s Creek.”
The same can be—and often is—said of the Cunard access point on the New River. Once that was developed, there was no way boaters would willfully put in at Thurmond at eight hundred cfs to run the Lower Gorge to Fayette Station.
Development of Cunard for public access almost certainly changed the game in terms of the growth of the industry as well, because “God knows how many guests we took down the river,” said Arnold, “on a hot August day from Thurmond at one thousand cfs who got off the river and said, ‘That was kinda cool, but I’m never doing it again.’”
River guides are likewise happy to have Cunard open. “If you walked out there,” said Arnold, as he nodded toward the Class-VI guest sign-in area, “and said, ‘Hey everybody, we’re going to Thurmond for the rest of the year; we’re not going to Cunard.’ Talk about revolution.”
“Jon Dragan made us realize that this wasn’t just an outfitting game,” said Proctor. “It was a real estate game.” After the Teay’s project, “we immediately made a decision that we were going to own every piece of land we set foot on…meaning put-ins at Meadow Creek, put-ins at Thurmond, put-ins at Prince, put-ins on the Gauley. We wanted a legal right—including lunch spots, if possible—to access the river.”
THE RISE OF THE RESORTS
In 1995, the West Virginia rafting industry as a whole carried 225,446 people down the New and Gauley Rivers. It was the highest number of rafting customers ever—and remains so to this day. In fact, in 2009, that number was 139,731, a 38 percent drop in business. The industry watched helplessly as huge chunks sloughed off. Not every year since 1995 yielded a decline, but most did. It was obvious to everybody, regardless of what company they owned or worked for, that the West Virginia rafting industry—not even thirty years old—was dying.
Where were all the missing customers? The answer was painfully simple. People didn’t want short-term trips anymore. Instead, vacationers were shopping for the coveted week and two-week holiday, and in droves, they began to opt for amusement parks, cruise ships and the beach over whitewater rafting.
The first companies to take the hit were smaller outfitters, which didn’t have the wherewithal to stand against the ebbing tide, but even the larger outfitters knew their time in operation would be short if they didn’t do something to change their business models.
Michael Ivey, who created Rivers’ first real brochure, remembers Eddie Lilly of Rivers talking about the resort concept as early as when he first purchased the company. “I watched a niche of college business happen,” said Ivey. “That was Eddie Lilly and Rivers. Eddie bought a company from, I think, [North American River Runners owner] Frank Lukacs’s brother, Glen. He owned the Rivers license and the property down Fayette Station Road. Eddie will credit him with having the idea of a destination resort.”
At the time, Rivers enjoyed a modest weekend business model. Like all the other companies, the bulk of his customers drove into town Friday night, ran the river and partied on Saturday and then left for home on Sunday. There was very little weekday business at any of the companies, and unless a Rivers customer slept in the back of his car, his only choices for lodging were the Holiday Inn or Comfort Inn.
Jon Dragan had established a model of feeding his customers down in Thurmond at their base camp, and the other companies soon learned from his success. Raft companies began to offer a keg of beer after their trips and sometimes cooked hamburgers. “It was a really big deal,” said Ivey, “when they started feeding people.”
Eventually, Lilly expressed his vision of a resort to Ivey. “He wanted ‘Rivers Resort complex,’” said Ivey. “He was the first guy to call it a ‘resort.’”
Other companies soon wised to the notion of keeping people longer than just a weekend, but while most went for families, Rivers dove 180 degrees in the opposite direction. It wanted to be the party capital. It made its rafting a little cheaper than its competitors, threw college specials together and started wooing its customers earlier in life. “It was forty dollars,” said Ivey. “You would run the river, get all the spaghetti you could eat, a few beer tokens and a place to camp for the night.”
Fayette Station rapid, New River, 1983: Butch Christian feels his raft get noticeably heavier as the “bucket boat” does what bucket boats did best—hold water. Butch Christian Collection.
Other, non-raft-centric companies also opened or moved to the area to take advantage of the tourism trade. Terry Ritterbush, for example, forsook the Colorado rafting industry and moved his company, Whitewater Photography, to the New River Gorge in 1983. He still operates from Fayetteville today, selling photos of smiling, exhilarated raft customers at the campuses of all the major outfitters. If you’ve ever seen a picture of rafting on the New or Gauley Rivers before reading this book, the chances are decent that a Whitewater Photography employee took it.
He wasn’t alone, however, in shooting visual images for long. In 1984, one of the most innovative companies on the water, Rivermen, pioneered the use of video for trip souvenirs. It was backbreaking work at the time to videotape a raft trip. There wasn’t just a camera, which in and of itself was unwieldy. They also had to have a separate recording unit. Steve’s brother, Brian, became one of the first whitewater videographers in the area and possibly anyplace.
When they first starting videoing, Brian and a friend began by running up the railroad tracks alongside the river to the Keeney’s rapids, where they filmed the trip, and then ran back up to the tracks. They then ran to the next rapid and did it all again. “I remember passing the trip,” said Brian. “We would get
down there and have to do the white balance. We’d have sweat just pouring off. We’d get set up just in time to get the trip again, then pack it up, head up the trails and run down to pass them again before the next rapid!”
“That lasted a couple weeks,” said Brian. “And then we got a trail bike.” The trail bike worked well, but even it was not without snags. First of all, it was highly illegal to ride a motorbike up and down the CSX tracks, not to mention dangerous for both people and equipment. One cameraman left the bike parked on the tracks as he filmed, until he heard a train approaching. “He raced up the hill,” said Brian, “and got there just in time, but he set the camera down in between the tracks. He got the bike off and then sat there and watched” as the train destroyed the camera.
At the end of their first videoed trip, the Campbells set up a television atop their van at the takeout and played the uncut footage for their guests. “And bam!” said Brian. “They just loved it.”
In 1985, Steve decided that video would be best if done on the river rather than beside it. He became the first video boater—possibly in the world—when he began to shoot from a raft. “I got downstream at water level, and everything is coming at me,” he said. “If one raft flips and those customers are in the water, the next raft is in the video and so is the next one. And there’s the customer swimming toward you. Everything was in it.” The approach was much more difficult than the way video boaters shoot today, from eddies or boulders alongside the water, but both Campbells agree the result was better.
Even early on in the industry’s history, horseback riders, ATV riders, rock climbers and even pack mule outfitters worked with rafting companies at one point or another, evidencing a multi-activity trend that Rivers may have conceived but that likely would have started anyway. Indeed, though they weren’t the first to contemplate a resort model, you won’t find a person in the industry today that doesn’t think ACE Adventure Resort implemented it the most successfully.