The temperature in Erwin, Tennessee, won’t crack freezing all day, but Trey Moore is nevertheless steeling himself at home for a winter’s morning on the water. He raises a steaming mug of tea to his salt-and-pepper beard, soaks up the heat of his gas fireplace, and hugs his friendly dogs, Kenobi and Noli—the latter named after the Nolichucky River, the nearby waterway to which Moore has dedicated his life.

“I have literally spent more time in the walls of the Nolichucky Gorge than I have in the walls of this house,” says Moore, an American Canoe Association–certified paddling instructor and owner of a river skills program called Eddyhopper Workshop. He estimates that he’s run the gorge more than 2,500 times in the past 15 years.

The Nolichucky Gorge inspires similar levels of devotion among many others in the paddling community. For about seven miles spanning western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, the Nolichucky River carves through national forest land in a deep canyon home to wildlife like otters and ospreys. Its rugged isolation and whitewater rapids, with colorful nicknames like “Jaws” and “Souse Hole,” are the foundation of an outdoor recreation industry worth at least $17 million annually.   

When Hurricane Helene struck the gorge in September, Moore and his fellow paddlers were worried that the storm might have damaged the river they love. But as the paddlers returned to the Nolichucky in early October, they began to worry about a different threat. Storm-related flooding had washed away miles of the Blue Ridge Subdivision railroad line operated by CSX Transportation, first constructed to run through the gorge in the 1890s. The company was eager to get that critical link in its rail network, the shortest route between Kentucky and Georgia, rebuilt as quickly as possible.

Dennis Ashford, an avid amateur kayaker and a professor of chemistry at Tusculum University, remembers his first encounter with CSX contractors in the heart of the gorge. “It’s beautiful and serene and peaceful … and then you start hearing them power-driving piles,” he recalls. “Then you come around the bend, and you’re—snap—back in reality. You could see them digging right on the river banks, mining out material.”

An excavator operated by CSX contractors drives across the bed of the Nolichucky River in Poplar, North Carolina, on December 6. 

Excavators were scooping rock straight from the riverbed to use as fill material for situating a new rail line, Ashford says, as well as widening the channel of the river itself. That work was disrupting habitat known to host the federally endangered Appalachian elktoe mussel and threatened flowering plant Virginia spiraea; it also promised to worsen future downstream water quality by removing the rock’s natural filtration. From a paddler’s perspective, riverbed rock like that being taken from the Nolichucky is what generates enjoyable rapids.

Ashford and others started raising concerns to CSX, emphasizing that the railroad should be rebuilt in a way that avoids unnecessary damage to the environment. Shortly afterward, he says, a company representative accompanied one of the paddlers on a tour of the river and gave a verbal promise that contractors would stop digging in the Nolichucky.

“We thought it was over. And then the next day, we went in, and they were still mining the river,” says Ashford.

In response, the paddlers got organized. They created a Facebook group, Nolichucky Witness, to share talking points and contact information for regulatory agencies with jurisdiction over the CSX rebuild. When that outreach failed to yield results, the group shared information with the national nonprofits American Rivers and American Whitewater, which proceeded to sue the US Army Corps of Engineers, US Forest Service, and US Fish and Wildlife Service for failing to put meaningful guardrails on the railroad’s work.

Paddler and Nolichucky River advocate Trey Moore picks a boat from the extensive collection in the garage of his home in Erwin, Tennessee.

Meanwhile, paddlers continued to brave the cold and use their whitewater skills to regularly monitor work areas that couldn’t be accessed any other way. Days after CSX assured regulators that they wouldn’t dig in the riverbed, a Nolichucky Witness member’s drone captured video of a company contractor doing exactly that.

“That, for lack of a better term, pissed the Army Corps off,” Ashford says. On December 2, the corps directed CSX to stop nearly all work in the Nolichucky until the company worked through the federal permitting process. The Tennessee Department of Environmental Quality filed its own notice of violation December 4, finding that the railroad had illegally harvested rock from at least three separate locations. The Southern Environmental Law Center, which is representing the environmental nonprofits in the lawsuit, declared “a huge win.”

The suit still remains active, and CSX did not respond to multiple requests for comment. In a November 22 legal filing, the company claimed that it was “working with a highly skilled team of engineers and environmental specialists to support recovery and restoration efforts within the regulatory framework.”

Longtime Nolichucky River guide Patrick Mannion points out the Chestoa Recreation Area, where the state's Department of Environment and Conservation found CSX contractors had illegally mined cobble rock from the riverbed. 

Patrick Hunter, the SELC attorney leading the case, told Tennessee TV station WJHL that those victories wouldn’t have happened without the dedication of the paddlers. “I feel really lucky to be able to be in court standing up to protect these places, but none of that would happen without these people out there on the ground,” he said. “They are really the foundation here in terms of protecting the Nolichucky Gorge.”

The members of Nolichucky Witness are not planning to let down their vigilance in the new year. The group is particularly worried about language in a permit recently granted by the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, which allows the railroad to take fill material from the river in designated areas. They calculate that CSX could instead use quarried rock for fill, thereby avoiding the need for any river dredging, at a cost of roughly $30 million to $50 million, less than a percent of the company’s $5.67 billion gross profit in 2023.

“The conditions include a requirement for CSX to develop a plan to communicate construction plans to recreational users of the river and outline a protocol for protecting recreational uses. There is also a condition that harvesting rock from the channel should be avoided and minimized, and limited to rock from the former railroad bed or toe access road,” wrote NCDEQ spokesperson Laura Oleniacz, in response to an inquiry on the permit.

As long as the river itself isn’t frozen over, paddlers like Ashford and Moore say they’ll keep running the Nolichucky throughout the winter to see how construction is progressing. And even when the river is frozen, they plan to keep raising awareness at local government meetings and writing letters to regulators. The gorge is too special, they say, to let up now.

“I went to the place that’s like church for me, and I saw my church being disrespected,” says Moore, before hefting a lime-green kayak and loading it atop his car for another trip down the river. “All I ask is for there to be a little more reverence for the place that we care so much about.”