The National Scout Jamboree won't be coming to Goshen Pass in Rockbridge County.

Boy Scouts of America said Tuesday that the Goshen Scout Reservation on the Maury River is no longer being considered as a home for the group's National Scouting Center and site of the quadrennial jamboree.

"Although we believe we can solve the technical issues to make it work, it's simply too restrictive from a land utilization perspective to do what we need to do for the amount of investment that would be required," Jack Furst, a member of the Boy Scouts of America board who is heading the search for the new jamboree site, said in a news release.

Furst said BSA is still on schedule to have a new site for the jamboree by 2013.

The jamboree would have brought more than 200,000 Scouts and others to the 4,000-acre site every four years, raising hopes of an economic jolt for a remote part of Rockbridge County among some people and fears among others that the wild expanse along the Maury would be forever changed.

"I'm thrilled, elated, ecstatic," said Linda Larsen, president of Friends of the Maury and resident of the Goshen area. "We will continue having the home that we have all chosen."

County officials were anticipating an economic boon should the details of making the site feasible be worked out.

In the end, Rockbridge County Administrator Claire Collins was left a little cold by the end of the process.

She had expected a meeting with BSA officials after they had done their due diligence in seeing if the site could work.

"Unfortunately, that didn't occur," Collins said. "It would be nice to know exactly what their issues were. ... It's not the business approach I would have expected from the Boy Scouts of America."

BSA is now studying a 10,000-acre site near Beckley, W.Va. Collins said she's confused by the BSA's decision to pull the plug on the Goshen site without having fully studied the alternative.

The BSA recently signed an agreement to buy the West Virginia land, a reclaimed mining site, for a "high adventure" camp, but will see if it will do as a jamboree site, too.

The Scouts have held the quadrennial jamboree at Fort A.P. Hill near Fredericksburg, Va., for the past 28 years, but started a search for a new site about two years ago. In February, after 18 months of searching, the BSA announced that the Goshen site topped a list of 80 spots in 28 states.

That sparked worry among the Maury River's protectors, who created the "Save Goshen Pass" blog to promote a petition drive and information campaign to halt the plan.

They cited concerns including whether the area's "primitive" roads could handle the traffic, the amount of sewage the jamboree would generate and the camp's water needs putting a strain on the aquifer, among other issues.

Nearly 2,000 people signed an online petition in opposition to the proposal, said Jay Gilliam, vice president of the group.

"I'm mighty thankful that this threat has gone away, and I hope there haven't been any hard feelings," Gilliam said. "I'm sure there's some."

The BSA's proposal immediately divided people, Gilliam and Larsen said. Some saw it as a chance for the isolated town of Goshen and environs to taste prosperity for a change, and the proposal's opponents as standing in the way of it.

"Antagonistic campaigns are no fun," Gilliam said. "But the idea that it's OK to trade ... the integrity of the Maury River for an unknown economic development, was just something we couldn't ignore."

Gilliam and Larsen both said they hope the controversy has drawn some attention to the needs of the Goshen area.

But it also drew unflattering attention to the BSA, a group dear even to some of the plan's opponents.

"It's unfortunate that the BSA, which generally has such a strong pro-environment ethos, let itself get backed into a corner where it was painted as the enemy of the environment," said Bill Mapp, 47, an Eagle Scout who camped and worked at the Goshen Scout Reservation from 1974 to 1981.

Larsen, a former den mother with two sons in Scouting and an Eagle Scout for a husband, never could reconcile the plan with the scouting's "do no harm, leave no trace" philosophy.

"Bless their hearts, they at least looked at the reality of the situation and said, 'This won't work,'" Larsen said. "I have respect for that."

Mapp put it more bluntly.

"If they lost their minds," he said, "they got them back."