Who Hates Trout Rivers?

As the bumper sticker proclaims, "Sh*t happens." But it shouldn't happen on blue-ribbon trout streams; and when it does, it means that government regulatory agencies are malfeasant, citizens disengaged and values warped.

Which takes us to West Virginia, where it has long been acceptable to extinguish aquatic ecosystems with acid-mine waste, blow up mountains and bury streams and valleys with "overburden" — in other words, everything living and dead that isn't coal. Now, apparently, it's OK to run raw sewage in plastic pipes along, around, over and under what is generally considered the best wild-trout water in the state.

This latest insult is planned for the upper Elk River, one of the very few West Virginia streams (maybe the only West Virginia stream) in which browns, rainbows and brookies spawn. It also sustains the planet's entire population of imperiled Elk River crayfish, listed as "vulnerable" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources on its Red List, the world's most comprehensive inventory of the global status of plants and animals.

The major limiting factor for wild trout in West Virginia is the state's relatively warm climate. But that's less of a problem on the upper Elk because a major tributary, Big Spring Fork, dips in and out of at least 68 karst caves and springs, charging the Elk with icy, oxygen- and limestone-rich water in which browns and rainbows commonly grow to five pounds. In most summers, Big Spring Fork flows almost entirely underground.

PVC pipe will carry as much as 1.5 million gallons of raw sewage a day from the Snowshoe/Silver Creek Ski Resorts (under single ownership but commonly referred to as just "Snowshoe") along Big Spring Fork's steep, tortured eight-mile course to the community of Slatyfork.

The sewage line will terminate at the Sharp family farm (founded in the early 19th Century by William Sharp III), where a $20 million "regional" sewage treatment plant is to be built by the Pocahontas County Public Service District with mostly state and federal funds. The construction site is a karst floodplain in a wet meadow where springwater bubbles and sometimes gushes from the earth and where sinkholes (the most recent 40 feet wide and 30 feet deep) open periodically.

The plan, approved in 2006, calls for a pumping station close to or possibly over part of a cave called the "Root Canal" because it's so near the surface of the earth that tree roots dangle from the ceiling. Treated effluent will be vented into the top of the Elk's 4.5-mile catch-and-release stretch where the prolific trout population is sustained by natural reproduction.

The catch-and-release section near Slatyfork is big water by Eastern standards, a series of wide pools and gentle riffles where you can wade comfortably and lay out long casts. Hatches can approach blizzard conditions. There's great streamer fishing in winter.