The Road That Poisoned the Creek

The creek keeping you company through here is Beech Flats Prong, and in the nineteen sixties, almost nothing lived in it. Crews rebuilding the highway near Newfound Gap cut into the Anakeesta Formation and used the broken rock for fill. That rock carries iron sulfides, and when they weather, they make acid. After the rebuild in nineteen sixty-three, for about five miles below the road cuts, the creek ran nearly empty. Scientists blamed the deaths of shovel-nosed salamanders on the acidic, metal-laden runoff. In nineteen seventy-nine, researchers found the creek turned a hundred times more acidic in a few hundred yards, just running through one road cut and fill. The road cuts near the gap still show orange rust. Same chemistry, still at work. Not every acid stream here is the road's fault. On the Tennessee side, Alum Cave Creek and Walker Prong run acid all on their own, off natural outcrops of the rock. Elsewhere in the park the fight is against non-native trout. As of twenty twenty-five, biologists had taken nineteen streams back to native brook trout, more than thirty-six miles of cold water with the right fish back in it.