Coal-Country Trout

This year the Corps of Engineers will install a "passive treatment" facility on Lick Run. Passive treatment (as opposed to active treatment-the sort I'd seen at the old T&T mine) requires no daily maintenance. The hollow is very narrow, with two mine portals on opposite sides and about 100 feet from the stream. The Army will put in a limestone-lined pool at each outfall and, below one, install a limestone channel half a mile long. On the other side it will use the stream itself, lining a half-mile with limestone boulders.

At Morgan Run we hiked up to another type of passive treatment facility. Perched over the mine outflow was a green "Aquafix" silo inside of which a buffering agent such as crushed limestone or cement-kiln dust is pulled down by a wheel powered by the water itself and at a rate appropriate to and determined by the flow-the more water, the faster the wheel spins; and the faster the wheel spins, the more buffering agent is dispensed. The device seemed sufficiently ingenious to have been invented in Japan. But no. "By two local miners," said Pitzer. "Milford Jenkins and his son Mike." After passing under the Aquafix the mine drainage goes through two settling ponds. All DEP has to do is show up every few months to fill up the silo and haul off the yellow boy. The whole project, including excavation, cost $251,000-which sounds like a lot until you consider that the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources has determined that a mile of trout stream contributes $40,000 to the state's economy each year. Morgan Run needs many more treatment facilities before it can support fish again.

No less nasty is Greens Run, which enters the Cheat across the canyon from Muddy Creek. But its North Fork is marginal, and, with three new passive treatment systems, including an Aquafix, it may soon be suitable for a transplant of wild brook trout. I inspected one of these systems, installed last fall by Friends of the Cheat with funds from EPA and the Department of Interior's Office of Surface Mining. Carved into an embankment 30 yards above a dirt road was a foot-deep, limestone-lined pool that catches mine drainage and brings the pH up, but not too far or too fast. The trick is to get it almost but not quite to the point where the metals drop out of suspension; otherwise the pool would fill up with yellow boy. From the pool the drainage tumbled down 800 feet of limestone-lined channel curled through mixed hardwoods as if it had always been there. "We're very happy about the way the contractor minimized his footprint," said Pitzer. "I don't think he took out any tree bigger than ten inches in diameter. He just picked his way through the woods."

The North Fork's new trout population, however, will be cut off from the rest of the Greens Run drainage. Isolation is a problem with much of Appalachia's brook-trout water and an enormous challenge for Friends, TU and their allies. Still, they're making headway. Pitzer rolled out a county map on which grossly acidified streams were colored red. The Big Sandy watershed showed as scarlet spaghetti, but the map was ten years old. "That wouldn't be colored red today," he said. "There's been a lot of passive treatment. We put in two sites on Beaver Creek, and we have one more to go; but above that-in four of the seven miles-we've introduced brook trout, and they're spawning. Once we put in the third site, we'll have a connection [for the trout] to Little Sandy." In 1989 the state Division of Natural Resources found no fish in a survey of Little Sandy. In 2001, at the same sampling site it found 14 species, including brook trout.

Like stream-bred brookies most everywhere, Appalachia's aren't giants; but, using dry flies only, Thorne exercises many ten-inchers and a few 12-inchers. "Few people realize how good our wild trout fishing is," he said. "Lots of woodland streams have gotten no mine runoff." What's more, the fishing is getting better fast. Thorne showed me a photo of a 13-inch male in spawning colors taken in the Red Run of Dry Fork, dead five years ago from acid rain. Here, and in other streams acidified by precipitation or mine drainage, a new and especially effective passive treatment is in use-dumping limestone sand directly into the stream each year. There's a formula that factors in pH and watershed acreage, but you can't get in trouble by using too much. At first biologists thought the lime would cement the bottom, but it doesn't. Frequently, trout hover over it.

In Charleston I stopped at the office of Friends of Blackwater, where director Judy Rodd and North Fork project leader Emily Samargo loaded me with documents, including an account in Harper's New Monthly Magazine by David Hunter Strother who, on a brook-trout quest in 1851, led the first Caucasians into the Blackwater country. Armed to the teeth with the fanciest tackle, much of which they smashed or dropped in the river, they killed fish like a reclamation crew. For example: "Conway . . . who had gone over to Blackwater, returned with about a hundred and fifty fine trout. This lucky forage afforded the company a couple of hearty meals."

The fishery didn't last long after that, but overharvest wasn't an important factor. Clearcutting weakened it, and coal mining killed it. Below Beaver Creek (not the one restored by Friends of the Cheat), the Blackwater was essentially dead until 1994. But then the state installed four perforated, hopper-fed drums which the current turns, grinding the limestone within and pulling out the particles in quantity proportional to the flow. This has restored excellent fishing on about 4.5 miles until the Blackwater collects its grossly acidified North Fork. Five years after the liming station went in, fish biomass in the spectacular Blackwater Canyon above the North Fork had increased from 15 pounds per acre to 42.3; and there has been steady improvement since.

The state now has a catch-and-release area in the canyon's first 3.5 miles. "It has turned out extremely well," says Mike Shingleton, in charge of the DNR's trout program. "In spring we stock catchable rainbows. In fall we put in fingerling browns. There's even limited brown trout reproduction." Fishing schools and guiding services are springing up. Darrell Hensley offers this description of canyon fishing in Fly Fish America: "Awesome waterfalls from countless feeder streams plunge into the river and the late afternoon sun causes the sandstone cliffs at the canyon's rim to glow a vibrant orange. During June and July the aroma and pinkish white blossoms of mountain laurel and rhododendron are throughout the canyon. . . . fishing these runs is fast and furious--lightning quick strikes will surprise you."

This restoration and the kind of work I'd seen on smaller tributaries, has dramatically improved the Cheat River for 18 miles. In 1973 survey crews turned up 24 smallmouth bass per acre at Seven Islands between St. George and Rowlesburg. In 1999 they found 289.

No major river in the United States has been made sicker by acid mine drainage than the Susquehanna's West Branch in Pennsylvania. Seventy-two percent of its 6,992 square-mile watershed has been damaged, and at least 150 miles of main stem and 500 miles of coldwater feeder streams have been essentially sterilized of aquatic life. Rehabilitation will cost something like $500 million, not counting operation and maintenance of treatment facilities; but that hasn't prevented Trout Unlimited, six state agencies, four federal agencies and 10 other partners from making impressive headway.