Take Me to The River: Doing Their Part

AMC Outdoors, March 2005

You could say the dip of a paddle takes away nothing, yet some paddlers are giving back all the same. “I was born and raised on the River,” says Ruth Jones, the 72- year-old owner of Kittatinny Canoes, a canoe livery in Dingmans Ferry, Penn., above the Water Gap. “I consider it my playground, my playmate, and my best friend.” Jones repays her friend well. For the last 15 years in a row, she’s led an annual river cleanup spanning 70 miles of shoreline. In July, she’ll be leading volunteers on Number 16. “We usually get about 200 volunteers,” Jones says. “We’ve hauled out over 7000 tires, tons of trash, 18 sticks of dynamite and a pair of false teeth!” She laughs. “I’ll clean up the river until the day I die. It’s my way of giving back.” Jones still paddles at least once a week, often taking her grandchildren with her.

Thanks to the federal designations, which protect two major sections of the river, and the creation of the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation, all but 30 miles are protected from any further development on its banks. But it wasn’t always so: The biggest threat to the Delaware came way back in 1956, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers planned the Tocks Island Dam project. By damming the Delaware River six miles upstream of the Delaware Water Gap (the actual two-mile gorge cut by the Delaware through the Kittatinny Mountains), the Tocks Island Dam—designed with the goal of reducing flooding—would have created a 40-mile long lake with depths up to 140 feet.

AMC Research Director Ken Kimball recalls AMC’s involvement in fighting the Tocks Island Dam project. “AMC and others in a coalition spent a good chunk of the 1970’s fighting creation of that dam in a process that dragged on for decades. The paddling in the Gap wouldn’t exist the way we know it today if the project had gone through.” The dam was a “hugely contentious issue,” Tom Gilbert remembers. “They wound up using eminent domain to buy a lot of people out.” “The river had political overtones,” says Charlotte Kidd, who lived in the area during the controversy. “The same people who protested the Vietnam War down in Washington protested the dam,” Kidd among them. The dam project dragged on for years, becoming a cause celebre before it was officially deauthorized in July 1992. “But the good thing about Tocks Island,” says Gilbert, who is now director of the Eastern Forest Conservation Funding Program of the Wilderness Society, “is that it paved the way for the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area.” In acquiring land for the dam, the federal government had appropriated 47,000 additional acres in addition to the 23,000 needed for the dam project, and put it aside for recreational use.

In 1965, the government used these acres to establish the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area (NRA). “We became strong advocates of development of the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area,” says Kimball. “It wasn’t a solo trip by AMC, but we worked in the development of the plan. We worked with the National Park Service on inventory and trail maintenance of the trail systems in the Gap.” AMC is still involved in the Delaware Water Gap NRA. Mac White, a DelawareValley Chapter member, is in charge of the maintenance of nine trails in the Gap. White is the New York–North Jersey Trails Conference Coordinator and supervises nine maintainers, one on each of nine trails in the Gap.”

Their work benefits millions of visitors annually, many of whom who hike the 100 miles of trails in the NRA as well as swim, paddle, and fish on 40 miles of the Delaware River. Another jewel in the Gap is the Mohican Outdoor Center, managed by AMC, in partnership with the National Park Service. “The Chapter helped get Mohican started,” White remembers. The former Weygadt Boy Scout Camp was attractive for two reasons: the location would extend AMC’s recreational reach into the southern region, and the area was protected by its inclusion in the Delaware Water Gap NRA, thanks to the Tocks Island Dam land-aquisition project. In the 1990s, AMC volunteers, many from the Delaware Valley Chapter, renovated the camp, creating a rustic but welcoming facility on a 60-acre glacial lake, tucked between two ridges in the Kittatinny Mountains and adjacent to the Appalachian Trail. There have been some great successes for proponents of the river. And now that we’re into the 21st century, the place to look for the protection of the Delaware River is the Highlands Greenbelt.