The 2026 Pennsylvania River of the Year is the Conestoga River, in the southeastern part of the state. Its headwaters are in Berks County, and the river flows more than 61 miles, meeting the Susquehanna River below the Safe Harbor Dam. More than 2,500 votes were cast online for the Conestoga River in the annual competition sponsored by the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and the Pennsylvania Organization for Watersheds and Rivers.
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The river was nominated by the Conestoga River Club. Malinda Clatterbuck is its new executive director.
“I grew up with my feet in the water and my hands in the dirt,” Clatterbuck said.
She was raised in Lancaster County and moved back to live in the house where she grew up after spending years out West. Most recently she worked at the Center for a Sustainable Environment at Franklin and Marshall College.
Clatterbuck said what’s special about the Conestoga River is its diversity.
“It’s urban, suburban, and rural. It goes right through downtown Lancaster,” Clatterbuck said.
She said it flows through wooded areas, pastures and farmland, including through the land of Plain Sect communities like the Amish and Mennonites who grow a lot of the food in the region. For Clatterbuck, the Conestoga River is the heart of the community.
“Part of my goal as the new executive director of the Conestoga River Club is to help make that connection for people who live in the Conistoga River watershed,” Clatterbuck said, “that this is the river that helps give you life.”
Issues in the watershed
But, Clatterbuck said, this tributary of the Susquehanna River also carries away waste. Like many other parts of the state, it has a combined sewer overflow problem when rainwater overwhelms the sewage infrastructure. Though there has been progress, agricultural runoff is still a problem, which ends up in the Chesapeake Bay.
We’re actually contributing more sediment overload to the Susquehanna and the Chesapeake than any other county in the state” said Todd Roy, founder of the Conestoga River Club.
He said the history along the river is profound, from Native Americans and trade, to the Conestoga wagon and later industry.
“With that growth comes poor practices, comes the abuse of [the river]. It helped build the country and didn’t fare well for the process,” Roy said.
Roy initially started the club because after a career as a chef, the wear and tear on his body made hiking difficult. He and his friends pivoted to kayaking, but soon discovered there weren’t a lot of access points onto the water.
“I guess it was sort of a little self-serving, that origin was to build better facilities so me and my buddies could go kayaking,” Roy said. “The idea was really very simple: Hold my beer and hand me a shovel.”
But it wasn’t that easy. The organization grew during the pandemic, with help from a foundation, the community and volunteers, who are the heart of the Conestoga River Club’s cleanups.
“We’ve kicked up somewhere in the neighborhood of 67 tons of trash. This is not a political thing,” Roy said. “We have the far left and the far right wading in the water together, yanking stuff out of the mud [like] weeds and the poison Ivy and doing the thing better.”
Roy and the club are dedicating the River of the Year to the memory of Ad Crable, a longtime environmental journalist in the area who wrote about the club’s founding in 2020.
“He was a storyteller and he understood that the land needs a voice,” Roy said. “For a few minutes, he let me be that voice, and it made me believe that maybe we could actually do this.”
Roy says Crable came out of retirement to write about the river’s nomination for River of the Year, but passed away before the piece could be published.
A year of celebration
The River of the Year designation comes with a $15,000 grant to help fund a slate of year-long activities. Clatterbuck says the details haven’t been worked out yet, but the Conestoga River Club will be expanding its programming, including Fun Facts Floats in kayaks in collaboration with other area organizations, like the Lancaster Conservancy.
“We’ll be inviting collaborators to do a float with us and talk about non-native invasives, and someone to float with and talk with us about the importance of creating riparian buffers on either side of the river for about 35 feet, which increases the health of the river,” she said.
Clatterbuck said she is also working on making the river more accessible, including women’ s programs to teach safety out on the water. For Todd Roy, the heart of their mission is environmental advocacy through recreation.
“If you get people on the water, they’re going to care a hell of a lot more about what’s in it and getting them to the water is the hard part,” he said. “Once you get them there, the river does the heavy lifting.”
With the 2026 River of the Year, Roy and Clatterbuck hope more people will discover and care about the Conestoga River – for the river’s sake, and for their own.
“Part of the appeal to kayaking, walking by, sitting on the banks of the river is just to watch the water flow,” Clatterbuck said. “To breathe and to allow that healing balm that is the natural world to flow over our souls.”
