"...... Visiting the Cranberry Wilderness in the Monongahela National Forest of southeast West Virginia is like going back in time. Ancient red spruce cast their shadows over mountains and ridges, peat bogs, and ice-cold streams teeming with native trout. The Cranberry Wilderness, which stretches over some 48,000 acres and sits in a pocket created by the convergence of Pocahontas, Greenbrier, and Nicholas counties, also happens to be the largest federally-protected wilderness area in the east. Hikers, campers, anglers, mountain-bikers, bird-watchers, tree-huggers, hunters, and others have mounted their excursions into the wilderness for years from nearby gateway towns like Marlinton, Richwood, and Lewisburg. But a specter has recently been cast over this unique treasure: West Virginia’s natural gas industry is booming faster than people can make decisions about how to deal with it. West Virginia is, after all, a literal mine of natural resources. It sits atop the prolific Marcellus Shale and Utica Shale. While coal has long helped fuel the state’s economy, it is the rise of fracking, or the extraction of natural gas, that has begun to worry some about its potential impact on the Cranberry Wilderness and the headwaters located there. While there are currently no plans on the table to frack inside this corner of the forest, there are several proposed interstate pipelines that would run through it. That has a diverse group of West Virginians worried—especially in the wake of the disastrous Elk River chemical spill in January 2014 that contaminated the drinking water for some 300,000 people near Charleston. What if something similar would happen in this area, which happens to be the headwaters of six major rivers—the Cranberry, Cherry, Gauley, Williams, Greenbrier, and the Elk?...."