New access to upper river, use of other segments ‘not enough’

Elijah Stinson runs the Woodall Rapid on the Chattooga River’s Section 4 (lower Chattooga), leading to Lake Tugaloo in Georgia.

Almost no one was pleased with the U.S. Forest Service’s revised management plan for recreational uses of the Chattooga River, released in late August. But paddlers like it so little they’ve elevated the issue to federal court — again.

On Oct. 14, American Whitewater, based in Sylva, filed suit over the issue in federal district court in Greenville, S.C. — a move that other stakeholders say jams up the process of administrative appeals that was just getting under way.

On the latest plan, anglers might have been content. That’s because the decision, made in response to a directive from Washington to revisit the decades-long ban on boating in the Upper Chattooga, continued a prohibition on boaters’ use of a section of the river prized by fishermen, in exchange for some very limited access by kayakers and canoeists further up.

The federal Department of Agriculture, of which the Forest Service is a part, ordered officials of the Sumter, Chattahoochee and Nantahala National Forests to revisit a management plan issued in 2004 that continued a then two-decade-old ban on floating on the Upper Chattooga, in response to a lawsuit by American Whitewater, a boaters group.

On Aug. 26, the Forest Service held a phone-in press conference for the media, to announce the decision being released: For the first time in more than 30 years, boaters would be able to use a 7-mile portion of the Chattooga River, from its confluence with North Mill Creek in North Carolina to Burrell’s Ford Bridge in South Carolina. The outcome represents some slight modifications to what had been characterized as the “preferred” fourth alternative plan from among 10 previously outlined.

The five years leading up to the Forest Service’s decision were contentious, with anglers, paddlers and conservation groups each coming at the issue seeking to uphold their somewhat disparate interests. The revised management plan sought to minimize “encounters” among different categories of users, and partly accomplished that goal, it said, by limiting boating on the river’s north fork to between Dec. 1 and March 1, and only when the flow is at least 450 cubic feet per second (cfs), or about two-and-a-half-feet deep, at Burrell’s Ford. That factor was expected to allow for only six boatable days per year.

Paddlers said at the time that the flow restrictions alone would be sufficient to minimize encounters, without the additional seasonal restriction on the upper segment where boating was being newly allowed — but also on the river stretch where paddling remains banned.

Conservationists agreed with part of that notion, but preferred to continue the ban on the upper, more environmentally sensitive — and dangerous — river segment, while dropping it lower down.

“[The decision] concludes on the one hand that the seasonal and flow-level restrictions will be sufficient to meet standards under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and the Wilderness Act to protect the 'wilderness experience' through Ellicott Rock Wilderness Area, yet on the other hand, the Forest Service proposes to maintain a total ban on whitewater boating below Burrells Ford to protect a high quality fishing experience at water levels too high to fish,” said a statement by the Clayton, Ga.-based Chattooga Conservancy. “In other words, the Forest Service bans boating to protect a user group that does not even utilize the river at the proposed boating [water] levels.”

‘Highly flawed’

While the Forest Service's decision consists of a modified version of Alternative 4, the Conservancy finds that highly flawed and recommends a tweaked Alternative 5.

“Alternative 4 prevents boating below Burrells Ford to protect quality fishing. This is a glaring oversight, given the fact that fishermen do not fish at higher levels because the water is too swift,” said comments on the decision on the Conservancy's website.

Conservancy Executive Director Buzz Williams elaborated on that position in an interview. “The proposed boater access from Bull Pen Bridge to Burrell’s Ford should be continued, and allowed to Highway 28,” he said. “Instead of giving the boaters seven miles to paddle, give them 15. If they are restricted by water level and season, we feel that should be sufficient. With proper restrictions, there's no reason to limit boating to protect the experience.”

According to Williams, “The [Forest Service's] preferred alternative, which creates a new access above Bull Pen Bridge will do considerable resource damage, by bringing in a host of new users, not just boaters, with new trails. That should be protected — the two miles above the bridge there. It's very dangerous the way it's choked with logs.”

Williams said the Conservancy's recommendation is one boaters should want to get behind, and not just because it doubles the amount of river they'd have access to. “Above Highway 28 there's a series of bridges, the next bridge up is Burrell's Ford, between the two, that's where a lot of the real good whitewater is,” he said. “There's no reason to exclude boating through there. Fishermen aren't there at those flow levels. But it has been designated priority-managed for fishing. DNR and the Forest Service sunk a lot of money into it being a fish trophy stream.”

That’s a point on which he and paddlers agree. Said American Whitewater’s Executive Director Mark Singleton in his comments on the group’s latest legal challenge: “The Chattooga is being managed as an industrial trout farm.” Asked why such deference might be paid to anglers, so that the Chattooga is said by AW to be the only river of its kind managed so as to so limit paddlers’ access, “I just really don’t know what this is about” in that regard, Singleton said.  But overall, "What has happened is there's a lot of autonomy given to the Forest Service in these regional plans. It is one of the strengths in national forest management that there is this local level of autonomy. The folks on the ground know what the issues are. But it also becomes its biggest liability when the planning process goes askew. That’s what’s happened here. It’s taken such a divergence from what national consistent management says it should be. It’s going so far off the center line and we’re having a hell of a time reeling it back.

“While it is good for regional autonomy, it’s very difficult to get it back on track when it’s gone this far astray,” he said.

What compromise?

Several extensive administrative appeals are posted on the Forest Service’s website, most of them from conservation groups opposed to the apparent “compromise” offered in the August decision to the two main opponents, anglers and paddlers.

Michael Bamford, of Friends of the Upper Chattooga, in Highlands, thinks he understands the seeming deference to trout fishermen, based on the long history of the river’s recreational use.

“The Forest Service didn’t say it, but they take into account that the boaters have the rest of the river,” Bamford said. “You have to go back to when the whole thing started — fishing was the number one use when they did the [Wild and Scenic] designation, it was the most popular use. Boaters started coming in, there was some conflict. Now, it’s not that you can’t fish, but you do have to wait till paddlers go by; there’s enough boaters that it can impact the experience.”

Bamford said paddlers' oftmade point that the stocking of the river is environmentally inappropriate is actually shared by anglers group Trout Unlimited at the national level, but that the Forest Service — in an example of that local autonomy based on “conditions on the ground” — may be heeding local anglers in persisting in the practice.

But Bamford perceives the paddlers group as greedy — and ruthless. Echoing some documents from the original designation, he said paddlers enjoy a great whitewater experience in the lowest segment of the river before it reaches Lake Tugaloo. That’s partly because they elbowed out other users, he said.

“This isn’t just about anglers and boaters, “Bamford said. “In a management plan in the ’70s, they were going to eliminate access to the lower river so boaters would have a wilderness experience. They eliminated trails so boaters wouldn’t have to see hikers and fishermen. The boaters said ‘Stop stocking with fish in the lower segment,’ so they did. Now boaters are saying, ‘We don’t want you to look at what we have, just look at what we don’t have.’ The Forest Service’s position is, ‘We’re not going to ruin the stocked section of the river, 10 miles, for you now, too.’”

In an irony, conservationists are now pointing out that wilderness values should now prevail over boaters’ desire for ‘equitable’ access to the upper Chattooga where they’ve (barely) been granted it, because access provisions offered to support the boating there are likely to be highly damaging to the river.

Singleton said an alternative put-in point at Grimshawe’s Bridge, if allowed, would be preferable and get around private property issues in that area.

Bad FONSI

Overall, groups from the Chattooga Conservancy to FOTUC to Georgia Forest Watch consider the Forest Service’s findings of no significant impact (FONSI) from the opening of the seven miles of upper river to the boaters laughable, or they would if they didn’t consider the findings illegal.

But while some argue that those findings, and the August decision, are so poorly rooted in the Environmental Assessment as to be legally unsupportable — and that the local forests’ plan to use “adaptive management” gives them excessive and arbitrary discretion — Bamford suspects that’s all consciously and shrewdly intended.

Other groups say of the EA, “‘You didn’t look [at any real research] so of course you didn’t find anything.’ The Forest Service did that on purpose,” Bamford said. “The idea is to keep it nebulous; it doesn’t say anything positive or negative about boating or fishing or hiking. It gives them flexibility to manipulate the plan” to whatever the outcome is that’s needed — presumably politically, as well as in terms of reasonably sound forest management.

In a release, FOTUC said the paddlers’ lawsuit is inconsistent, even hypocritical. It “argues that the published [environmental] assessment was incomplete, but then cherrypicks statements within the assessment to argue that unlimited boating should be allowed. If the assessment is deficient, no valid conclusions (including kayakers’) can possibly be verifiable,” FOTUC wrote.

“[The Forest Service isn’t] listening to anybody, either side; they’re just looking at ‘How are we going to win a lawsuit?’” Bamford posited. “No matter what they do, it’s going to be filed to appeal by either side. In truth, very few forest plans get overruled by the judiciary. They get sent back to do more work.”

That being the case, Bamford is critical of the filing of the federal action, as stated in an e-mailed release. “Why do it now, why not wait till after the administrative appeal?” he said, in a belief that a lawsuit puts any administrative appeal AW also filed, as well as those submitted by others, on hold. He said that answers his own question, “Why now?”:

In 2004, “When they filed the last lawsuit, right in the middle of a public process, it was not going well for the boaters,” Bamford said. “There were public meetings, with birders, hikers participating. All of a sudden boaters filed a lawsuit. That stopped everything. The Forest Service couldn’t talk to anybody, there were no public meetings. Forest Service lawyers just talked to American Whitewater lawyers — for six months — then process opened up again,” along with the order from Washington.

“My guess this is just another tactic to eliminate everybody else from the plan,” Bamford said. “It seems to be what they’re doing.”

And, he admitted, “It’s brilliant, it’s working for them.”