WCP Online Newsletter

WCP votes to support Chattooga Headwaters access
by Harrison Metzger

Contributed 10/05/2005  Responses:  0

More than 20 members showed up for the club's meeting Tuesday, Oct. 3, at UNCA. We saw several new faces, drawn no doubt by the excellent powerpoint presentation by Leland Davis on the making of his definitive new guidebook, North Carolina Rivers and Creeks.

Those present voted unannimously to support a motion to give $500 to American Whitewater to aid in their legal fight to gain legal access to sections OO,O and 1 of the National Wild and Scenic Chattooga River. Strong support for the motion was voiced by WCP president and AW board member Chris Bell, member and past board member Lee Belknap and member Robin Knupp, as well as others. Even though WCP is a small club with about 45 paid members (five signed up Tuesday night) the members felt this cause was worthy of our strong support. The gift will still allow WCP to maintain a significant amount in our bank account for future needs while setting an example for other paddling clubs across the Southeast to follow.

It looked like the issue of paddler access to the Upper Chattooga had been settled this spring when the Chief of the U.S. Forest Service ruled that Sumter National Forest had wrongly excluded boaters from paddling the scenic and challenging headwaters for 30 years. However the chief allowed the ban to stay in effect for two years while the agency studies the issue, and there are concerns that the South Carolina Forest Service officials will simply use the two years to try to justify continuing the ban.

For the record, the Chattooga headwaters are the only section of river that flows across the public's U.S. Forest Service lands in the United States closed to canoeing and kayaking. We hope that the filing of legal action will convince the Forest Service to abandon its unfair and discriminatory rules which single out boaters but no other user groups.

AW board member Don Kinser, who has led the fight for access to the headwaters, extends his thanks to WCP for the gift, as does Milt "Paddlesnake man" Aitken. If you care about this issue, please consider attending the first meeting the Forest Service plans as it begins to restudy this issue. The meeting is set for
Thursday, October 13, beginning at 4 pm at the Civic Auditoriumon in Walhalla, SC.
I hope to attend if I can find others to carpool with and am able to get off work. Please email me if you are interested. For further information, see:

http://www.americanwhitewater.org/archive/article/1419/