American Whitewater Chattooga Project

The Chattooga River, which starts in Western North Carolina and flows south to form the border between Georgia and South Carolina, was designated a Wild and Scenic River in 1974. Two years later the United States Forest Service made a decision to prevent boating on the uppermost 21 miles of the river without cause. American Whitewater worked from 1995 to 2012 to see the prohibition lifted through administrative appeals and federal court challenges. The culmination of these efforts was a 2012 Forest Service decision ease the restrictions. Since that time the remaining seasonal, flow, and geographical restrictions have proven unnecessary, but remain in place.

American Whitewater appealed the 2004 forest plan for the Sumter National Forest (SNF) that renewed the boating ban on the Wild and Scenic upper Chattooga River. In April of 2005 the Washington Office of the USFS agreed with AW that there was no basis for a ban on boating or any limits to any users of the forest. The Washington Office gave the Sumter National Forest 2 years to carry out a User Capacity Analysis and reach a new decision on the fair and equitable management of all uses in the Chattooga Corridor. The Forest Service slowly began crafting their arguments against paddling, but refused to allow paddling to occur or to collect any relevant data on visitor numbers, activities, or opinions. Eventually they settled on the idea that paddlers would conflict with other visitors, and to avoid those conflicts paddling should be banned (and other uses allowed in unlimited numbers). They failed to document a single conflict between paddlers and other visitors on the upper Chattooga or any similar river. They reached and promptly withdrew a decision to severely limit paddling in 2009 before releasing their final 2012 decision that imposes the harshest limits on paddling in the entire Forest Service system, while imposing no direct limits on other similar visitors. Since use was partially restored monitoring has shown that paddling use is extremely small and isolated and causes no conflicts or resource damage, and that the limits are unnecessary.

Conservation-oriented paddlers filed suit in October of 2009 to restore the public’s ability to paddle the headwaters of the 52-mile Wild and Scenic Chattooga River. The Plaintiffs in the lawsuit include American Whitewater, American Canoe Association, Atlanta Whitewater Club, Foothills Paddling Club, Georgia Canoeing Association, Western Carolina Paddlers, and three individuals. The kayakers and canoeists are being represented on a pro bono basis by the law firms of Jackson Lewis and Nelson Galbreath, and long benefited from representation by Patton Boggs. On December 2, 2010 United States District Judge J. Michelle Childs issued a partial decision regarding the management of the Wild and Scenic upper Chattooga River, located in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. The decision follows a hearing held in October. The decision denied the US Forest Service's motion to dismiss the case against them. The decision also denied a preliminary injunction request that would have granted paddlers the ability to float the Upper Chattooga immediately and throughout the judicial process. With conservation-oriented paddlers' case deemed ripe and valid for judicial review, the case proceeded to trial. Our case was then transferred to a new judge who ruled in favor of the Forest Service. The paddling plaintiffs appealed this decision to the 4th Circuit and were unsuccessful in a 2014 decision. With this said, litigation played an essential role in raising important issues and shifting the management of the river in a good direction.

A group calling themselves Friends of the Upper Chattooga wrote a letter in 2006 formally requesting that Overflow Creek, a tributary to the Chattooga River, be immediately closed to boating by the USFS. The USFS denied the request, and American Whitewater followed up with adetailed analysis in support of the USFS position that Overflow is in fact open to paddlers. The request came from groups like the NC, SC, and GA chapters of Trout Unlimited and the Chattooga Conservancy.