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.