New River

About

New River, West Virginia — 1978 National Wild and Scenic River. Flow is the first thing a paddler checks, and on the lower New the standard index is USGS station 03185400 at Thurmond, gauging a drainage of roughly 6,752 square miles. Discharge there averages about 3,200 cubic feet per second, with a historical figure near 2,900, and the optimal paddling window runs from 1,500 to 6,000 cfs. The runnable water is divided into three distinct reaches: the Upper New from Sandstone to Grandview, a Class I–II stretch that is family-friendly; Grandview to Fayette Station, Class III–IV and the most popular; and the Dries, a Class IV–V technical run at low water.

The gorge itself is old country — the New is dated to at least 65 million years, one of the oldest rivers on Earth — but the forest that walls it in is comparatively young. Timber and coal reshaped the New River watershed between the 1830s and the 1920s, and the industrial reordering began when the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway pushed its mainline through the canyon in the 1870s. Once rails reached the river, dozens of coal mines opened along its walls and the New River Coalfield grew to more than sixty company coal towns, among them Thurmond, founded in 1873. Logging advanced alongside the mines, feeding coke ovens that turned New River coal into fuel for the nation's steel mills; turn-of-the-century photographs show hillsides stripped nearly bare.

The human history of the corridor stretches back to the Indigenous peoples who used the river as a travel corridor, hunting ground, and gathering place before the treaty-and-removal era of the 1800s. The confluence of the New with the Ohio was the site of the Battle of Point Pleasant on October 10, 1774. The industrial era brought tragedy as well as prosperity: the 1877 Hawks Nest Tunnel construction disaster, described as the worst industrial disaster in West Virginia history, killed 764 or more workers.

Conservation eventually reclaimed the gorge. In 1978, 53 miles of the New were designated the New River Gorge National River, signed into law by President Jimmy Carter on November 10, 1978. Since 2010, conservation more than active restoration has defined the river's recent decades, and in 2020 its most rugged core gained its strongest protection yet: the redesignation as the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, signed December 27, 2020, set aside roughly 7,021 acres as national park and about 65,165 acres as national preserve. After some fifty years of forest regrowth, the gorge is regarded as the most botanically diverse river system in the central and southern Appalachians.

One fight over flowing water still shapes the lower river. For a century the Hawks Nest Hydroelectric Project has diverted the New through a tunnel, leaving the 5.5-mile reach known as the Dries largely dewatered. A federal relicensing opened in 2012, and when regulators issued a new 47-year license at the end of 2017, American Whitewater challenged prescriptions that would return only three or four paddling-quality flow days a year against more than 240 lost to the diversion. Today the New is also a premier smallmouth bass fishery, its water quality shaped by Clean Water Act monitoring since 1972 and paralleled onshore by the 57-mile New River Trail State Park, established in 1995.