Matt Gentry | The Roanoke Times

Than Hitt, a research associate with Virginia Tech's fisheries and wildlife sciences department, holds up a bag containing an Appalachia darter, a species unique to the New River.

A great blue heron launches from a perch along the river's bank.

River guide Andy Jensen catches a fish among the rocks of Double Shoals in the New River.

The feet of Lt. Col. John Dreshal, commander of the Radford Army Ammunition Plant, stick up from the waters of the New just up river of Whitethorn. Drushal was part of a 20-person float that traveled the section of the river bordering the arsenal property as part of the 10th anniversary of the river's designation as an American Heritage River.

Swallowtail butterflies land on the bank of the New River.

Travis Jefferson of Sparta, N.C., waters his girlfriend's horse, Ellie May, in the New River near the Virginia-North Carolina line. Biting horse flies were bothering horses along the river.

MCCOY -- Before there were trees or birds or muskrats or mountains, the river was here.

"Everybody knows the New River is one of the oldest rivers on the planet," Than Hitt told a group gathered on an island below McCoy Falls on Monday. "But it's also unique, not only nationally, but globally."

Eight species of fish -- about 18 percent of the native species in the New -- are found nowhere else, he said.

But when Hitt led the group in sampling some riffles just off the island, the most common catch was the non-native telescope shiner. It was most likely a bait bucket release -- leftover bait dumped into the river at the end of some angler's day. It's proved very hardy, spreading through dams and establishing itself among the natives and the other introduced species.

Some of them, such as the bass and muskellunge and walleye, were put there on purpose as game fish meant to attract people and the money they might spend at bait shops and campgrounds and other businesses. Others, such as the telescope shiner -- named for its large eyes -- were put there with much less purpose in mind.

Hitt is a research associate with Virginia Tech's fisheries and wildlife sciences department. He grew up in West Virginia and floated the river from Eggleston to West Virginia's Bluestone reservoir often. His passion for the river is evident and it's a passion shared by people along the river's banks from its headwaters near Boone, N.C., to its confluence with the Gauley River at Gauley Bridge.

"All along the way, it's a phenomenal, phenomenal river," Shawn Hash said Monday.

Hash, who owns Pembroke-based Tangent Outfitters and makes his living guiding people on fishing and canoe trips, was instrumental in organizing the float trip to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the New becoming an American Heritage River. The trip, which was also organized by New River Community Partners, began June 6 at North Carolina's New River State Park and ended Saturday in Hinton, W.Va. At several stops along the way, local leaders participated in a passing-the-paddle ceremony -- a symbolic linking of communities along the way.

Hash's idea was to get people on the river, to help them develop personal connections to the New that will move them to protect it.

Some people formed those connections without Hash's help. All along the New River, resident groups such as Giles County's Renew the New look after sections of the river. Renew the New and the volunteers it attracted pulled 300 tires and 2 tons of trash from the river one day last year, Ann Goette told a group that gathered at her house across from the Palisades last week.

But clearly not everyone has joined in. Someone's dumping that stuff in the river, after all.

Some communities, such as Radford, have embraced the promise the New River holds. Christening itself The New River City, Radford has developed parks and trails along the river and is looking for other ways to protect and exploit the river's potential. But while three of Radford's five council members attended a celebration of the river and the city's connection to it, only one of Giles County's supervisors -- Vice Chairwoman Barbara Hobbs -- attended either of two river celebrations in Giles County on Monday.

While Radford is looking to the river to enhance the city's quality of life, in Giles County, where riverside land is zoned for industrial use, three years worth of toxin-laden coal ash is being buried at the river's edge.

Montgomery County's stretch of the New River is home to the state's largest polluter, according to the federally mandated Toxics Release Inventory. The Radford Army Ammunition Plant put more than 13.7 million pounds of toxins into the air, land and water in 2006, the latest figures available. That's more than double the output of the state's second-largest polluter.

More than a ton of persistent bioaccumulative toxics -- toxics that accumulate in living things -- were in the arsenal's total. It was mostly lead, but there was mercury and dioxin compounds in there, too. Lead and mercury are most dangerous for developing fetuses and young children, but they can damage anyone's nervous system. Lead can damage almost any system in the body. Dioxins can cause cancer.

By weight alone, the arsenal's largest discharge was nitrates. It put 13.5 million pounds of them into the New in 2006.

And yet, the arsenal is much more river-friendly than it used to be and is working to be more river-friendly still.

Last week, Lt. Col. John Dreshal, commander of the facility, rafted through the arsenal with the commemorative float. Early in the float, George Santucci, executive director of the National Committee for the New River, was pointing out places where the riverbank needed more vegetation to hold it up. Before the trip ended, Dreshal was pointing out those places himself and promising to get something done about them.

People have lived along the New River for at least 10,000 years -- not long in the life of a river that may be 400 million years old, but long enough to leave a mark.

According to a report released by Virginia's Department of Environmental Quality last week, nearly 1,000 miles of the New River and its tributaries are impaired in some fashion. Of course, not all of the basin's 4,114 miles were tested.

On 135 of those miles, people are advised not to eat some fish and to eat others sparingly. Most of that is because the fish are contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls, which have a variety of ill effects on people. But on nearly 30 miles of the river, the problem is mercury. On nearly 10 miles, the problem is pesticides. There are problems in Claytor Lake, too.

At the paddle passing ceremony at Claytor Lake State Park, Del. Anne Crockett-Stark, R-Wytheville, reminisced about the cabin on the lake her family began visiting in 1947. Her father bought a Navy surplus landing barge and mounted a five-horsepower motor on it. It took all day to ride to the store and they could swim faster than the boat could move. "But we thought we were living high," she said.

Her family could spend weeks on the lake without seeing anyone else, Crockett-Stark said.

Things have changed. And not everyone who lives in the New River watershed has the kind of personal connection to the river the delegate does. That's a lot of what the American Heritage River commemorative float was all about -- connecting people and communities along the New River to the river and to one another.

"There was the whole idea of this thing," Hash said, "to get people together."

Organizers are already planning next year's float.