North Branch Susquehanna River

About

North Branch Susquehanna, Pennsylvania — 2023 River of the Year. The river's water still carries the region's history. At USGS gauge 01541303 the North Branch averages 887 cubic feet per second, and paddlers generally find their best window between 450 and 1,350 CFS. From Cooperstown the stream runs southwest across Susquehanna, Bradford, Wyoming, Luzerne, Columbia, and Northumberland counties, a 185-mile corridor of floodplain farms and forested ridges that ends at Shikellamy State Park, where the North Branch and the West Branch join to form the main stem.

Long before the gauging stations, this was Indigenous country. The North Branch flowed through the ancestral territory of the Lenape (Delaware), the Susquehannock, the Shawnee, the Iroquois Confederacy, and the Munsee, who used the river as a primary travel corridor, fishing ground, and gathering place. The Delaware Tribe and the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians maintain cultural connections to these waters today.

The river's defining historical chapter is the Pennsylvania hardwood era. From the 1700s through the 1920s the watershed was logged to feed a chain of industries: oak, hickory, chestnut, white pine, and hemlock supplied the anthracite-coal mining timbers industry, the Pennsylvania Railroad expansion, and the iron and steel industry. County sawmills and famous logging drives moved the timber downstream, while the hemlock-bark leather-tanning industry stripped the forests further. The 1910 chestnut blight and the exhaustion of the old-growth stands brought the large-scale logging era to a close, followed by the rise of state forestry conservation and the creation of state forests.

Hydrologists arrived on the heels of the loggers. The USGS Pennsylvania Survey of the 1880s through 1910s and the establishment of gauging stations along the North Branch produced the first comprehensive assessments of the river's flow. Later water-quality studies, and the Clean Water Act assessments that followed, began to reckon with more than a century of logging, mining, agricultural, and industrial impacts.

That reckoning defines the river's present. Since 2010 the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, working with watershed partnerships and with the Delaware Tribe and Stockbridge-Munsee Band, has addressed those accumulated impacts through streambank stabilization, native fish restocking of brook trout and smallmouth bass, Abandoned Mine Drainage remediation, and the Chesapeake Bay TMDL Phase III. The AMD projects restored brook trout habitat to tributaries of the Wyoming Valley. It was this work that Pennsylvania recognized with the 2023 River of the Year designation.

Today the North Branch is the focus of the North Branch Water Trail, a designated water trail associated with the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, and it supports smallmouth bass and trout fisheries from Towanda to Sunbury. The river endures as a defining feature of the region's geography — still grappling with old scars while drawing paddlers, anglers, and communities back to its banks.