Nantahala River

From Standing Indian to Fontana

The Nantahala rises in the southwest corner of Macon County, North Carolina, in the bowl under Standing Indian Mountain that the Forest Service calls the Standing Indian Basin. Wikipedia, drawing on the federal names database, puts the source where Kilby Creek, Gulf Fork and Big Laurel Branch come together near Scream Ridge, at about 3,800 feet. The river runs northwest to the line between Clay and Macon counties, follows it for a while, and turns north along the western foot of the Nantahala Mountains. At the range’s north end it cuts the Nantahala Gorge, nine miles long by one account, and enters the Little Tennessee in Fontana Lake at about 1,708 feet. The Gazetteer puts that meeting in Graham County and other sources put it in Swain, a difference that comes down to where the county line falls under the lake.

The gorge follows a dark banded slate. Arthur Keith named it the Nantahala slate in 1907, and later mapping gave the formation’s type locality as the river itself. The Gazetteer glosses the name Nantahala as “sun in the middle” and says it was applied to the gorge the river runs through.

The diverted river

In 1929 Alcoa chartered Nantahala Power and Light to dam this river and its neighbours for aluminum. Work stopped in July 1931 and resumed in 1940. In May 1941 the Franklin Press reported about a thousand men on three shifts, the diversion tunnel finished, and the lake expected to begin filling that summer. Two sources date the dam’s completion to 1942. The lake drowned most of the stage-stop community of Aquone, and the Gazetteer gives it 1,605 acres and a greatest depth of 225 feet.

The dam is a diversion. The river’s flow goes through a penstock about five and a half miles long, mostly underground, to the powerhouse at Beechertown, and returns to the channel far downstream. The natural bed between runs nearly dry except when Duke Energy, which bought the power company in 1988, releases water.

Below the powerhouse

Released water makes the run the river is known for, eight miles of Class II and III rapids from the powerhouse to Wesser. Commercial rafting began there in 1972, the year the Nantahala Outdoor Center opened in a motel its founders took over. The tailwater has its own reputation among anglers. Wikipedia reports a wild rainbow trout population among the healthiest in North Carolina, a self-sustaining population of brown trout, and a state-record brown of 24 pounds 10 ounces taken in 1998. Each of those figures rests on a single source.