American Whitewater and our partners successfully defended the public right to float rivers and streams in South Carolina through engaging in — and winning — a court case in 2016. In the decision released July of 2016, a South Carolina court rejected an attempt to privatize a section of the South Fork of the Saluda River known as Blythe Shoals. The Court ruled that the entire river – rapids and all – is navigable and shall remain open to recreational paddling.
When a landowner sued the State of South Carolina and the upstream landowner Naturaland Trust in late 2013, American Whitewater and the local Foothills Paddling Club joined the lawsuit to help defend the right to float. Nathan Galbreath served as our pro bono counsel with assistance by Jeff Harris, both of the law firm Nelson & Galbreath, LLC.
Nathan and Jeff coordinated the collection of numerous videos of people paddling Blythe Shoals at various levels and presented them to the Court as evidence with signed affidavits by the paddlers. When the landowners acquired an affidavit claiming the river was impossible to navigate in a canoe, AW’s Kevin Colburn and canoeist Chris Loomis made a video of a nonchalant canoe descent. As it turned out, creating and submitting paddling videos as evidence was an effective strategy. The Court decision cited this evidence as definitive proof of navigability.
The Court also upheld and reiterated over a century of case law that ensures navigability does not depend on commercial use, vessel size, two-way travel, actual use, ease of use, safety of use, use at all water levels, or use of all reaches. Instead, the Court clearly found “the standard for navigability rests on the potential for any public use, be it commercial or recreational.”
We’d like to thank everyone who chipped in, including our pro bono legal team at Nelson & Galbreath, the State of South Carolina and Naturaland Trust who stood up for public recreational rights, all the paddlers that submitted evidence of their Blythe Shoals descents, and the Foothills Paddling Club.