Upper Cheat River

About

Upper Cheat River, West Virginia — 1880s Logging Era. The river's working record starts at the water itself. USGS streamgage 03203600 tracks the Upper Cheat, where discharge averages about 1,157 cubic feet per second and the optimal paddling window falls between roughly 575 and 1,750 cfs. A separate USGS gaging station on the Cheat near Parsons drains about 718 square miles of the upper watershed and supplies the long-term flow record that hydrologists and boaters lean on today. The Upper Cheat River Water Trail follows this reach, a designated route stewarded by Friends of the Cheat.

Long before gauges, the Upper Cheat country was a Native travel and hunting ground rather than a place of permanent villages. The Seneca Trail, a major north–south path used by the Algonquian Shawnee, the Tuscarora, and the Seneca, ran through Tucker, Randolph, and Pendleton counties; it entered present Tucker County by way of Horseshoe Run northeast of St. George, crossed Shavers Fork of the Cheat, and continued south up the Left Fork of Clover Run. The Massawomee, an Iroquoian people, are the group most associated with the region, which served chiefly as a hunting range — the high, harsh Canaan Valley at the river's headwaters was so forbidding that Native people were not known to travel into it. A prehistoric burial mound at Horseshoe Bend on the Cheat River, roughly 40 feet wide and 5 feet tall, still marks that long Indigenous presence.

The valley's industrial century came with the timber boom. The Upper Cheat was logged from the 1800s through the 1920s, its hardwood stands feeding a wider West Virginia lumber industry, and crews drove felled timber down the river to the mills. Lumber towns such as Davis grew up across the watershed. When the cherry and poplar stands were exhausted in the 1920s and state forestry conservation took hold, large-scale logging wound down — but coal mining left a longer shadow on the water.

Systematic study of the Upper Cheat's waters began when the West Virginia Legislature established the West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey in 1897, based at West Virginia University. Its first director, the pioneering geologist Israel Charles White, served from 1897 to 1927 and set up streamgages on the state's principal rivers as he mapped its topography and resources. Oversight later shifted toward water quality: the federal Clean Water Act of 1972 required states to inventory impaired streams, and the acid mine drainage crippling the Cheat made it a priority case. In 2001, EPA Region 3 and the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP) issued metals and pH Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDLs) for the watershed.

Those targets guided the comeback. Beginning in 1995, Friends of the Cheat and its partners built more than 20 passive treatment systems — limestone beds and settling ponds that neutralize acidity and drop out dissolved metals — across the watershed's Abandoned Mine Lands. Between 2000 and 2013 that work cut acid-mine-drainage loading to the Cheat by more than 1.7 million pounds, and since 2000 restoration has drawn over $5.1 million in support, including $2.6 million in EPA Section 319 nonpoint-source grants administered through the WVDEP. The result is a river that once ran orange now running clear enough to carry paddlers down its designated water trail.