DNR Tries to Bring Back Brook Trout to W.Va. River

Charleston Gazette
4 July 2011

CHEAT BRIDGE, W.Va. (AP) - To a casual onlooker, the excavators and bulldozers working high on Cheat Mountain look as if they're building something modern. What they're really trying to do is turn back the clock.

Their ultimate goal is to restore 19th-century brook trout fishing to the headwaters of Shavers Fork of the Cheat River.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, when railroads and logging crews began moving into the upper Shavers Fork watershed, the stream teemed with brook trout. Photos taken at the time show fishermen with stringers that contained dozens of trophy-sized brookies.

The stream went downhill fast after the logging crews had their way. Lumberjacks floated huge rafts of logs down the river, rafts that bulldozed boulders out of the stream and left the bottom flat and featureless. Without trees and fallen logs to provide shade and cover, the temperature-sensitive brook trout died off.

The West Virginia Department of Conservation and its descendant, the state Department (now the Division) of Natural Resources, tried to compensate for the lack of brook trout by stocking brown and rainbow trout, both of which can tolerate higher temperatures. Without boulders and sunken logs to provide habitat, though, the stockings never really took.

Fifteen years ago, DNR senior planner Steve Brown began wondering what it might take to restore boulders, logs, deep runs and oxygen-generating riffles to the flat, featureless portion of Shavers upstream from Cheat Bridge.

The dream remained on hold until a couple of years ago, when former U.S. Rep. Alan Mollohan assigned the DNR a $2.25 million earmark grant to begin work on the project.

"Without the earmark, this project would still only be in the dream stages," Brown said.

With the grant, DNR officials hired engineers to draw up restoration plans. At about the same time, the federal National Resources Conservation Service was building a dam on Elkwater Fork of the Tygart River. The project's parameters required Tygart Valley Conservation District officials to mitigate the loss of the free-flowing stream by doing restoration work elsewhere. They chose to help restore upper Shavers Fork, to the tune of $4 million.

The Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture, a coalition composed of fish and wildlife agencies, academic institutions and conservation organizations, heard about the project and contributed $50,000 toward the effort.

The first phase calls for construction crews to build a proper railroad bridge over Beaver Creek, a brook-trout spawning area that until recently ran through a culvert under the tracks. Over the years, water pouring from the culvert had scoured away the rocks downstream, creating a waterfall too high for brook trout to ascend.

Work on the bridge began two weeks ago. Crews from Hurricane-based TrakSpec Railroad Corp. are putting in 12-hour days to try to remove the culvert, build the bridge and create a natural-looking fish ladder to the spawning areas.