Profile of a watershed

Marshall Run is a 3rd-order mountain stream draining 7.5 sq. miles mostly in the George Washington National Forest. The mainstem descends 2100 ft from the summit of Beech Lick Knob (3300 ft, a proposed wilderness area) to the NF Shenandoah River (1200 ft) in just 5.6 miles, averaging 5% slope.

Marshall Run watershed topo map.

Like virtually all of the eastern forest, the entire watershed was logged in the early 20th century. Old logging road/railroad grades parallel all the tributaries to the headwaters, and rusty artifacts of camp stoves, tires, oil cans, etc. can still be found buried under the leaf litter. Today these trails are maintained by avid hunters who set up camp near the confluence of Root and Marshall runs every fall.

LRD (Large Rubber Debris) way up Marshall Run.

Timber sales in the early 1990s resulted in a complex of clearcuts along Cabin Ridge.

1996 was a memorable water year. The Blizzard of (January) 1996 dumped 30 inches of snow...

...which was followed by warm weather and torrential rain causing rapid melting...

...which washed out the Yankeetown Road crossing (see my Oral explanation for the story of the replacement culvert).

9 months later in September 1996, Hurricane Fran brought torrential rains...

...and the flood of the century recorded at the nearby NF Shenandoah River stream gage...

...which demolished the Yankeetown Rd bridge over the NF Shenandoah.

After 1996, Marshall Run was not the same. The following (grainy) Google Earth image from 1989 shows the stretch of Marshall Run that crossed our property (clearings in upper right). The yellow marker indicates where there was a deep pool that held brook trout.

The floods of 1996 filled the lower segment of Marshall Run (below Root Run) with cobble--not one deep pool remained. The next image, taken in 1997, shows the same area as the previous image, with new cobble bars visible at the yellow marker where the pool used to be. To this day, deep pools are still lacking in lower Marshall Run.

Land owners should leave the large trees where they fall in the channel so large wood is available to scour out new pools in future floods.