Blue Hole Creek is one of those places people in the Laurel Highlands hand down to their kids: a cold, clear swimming hole tucked into the forest, a favorite stop for backpackers on the Laurel Highlands Hiking Trail. This summer, the Mountain Watershed Association gathered neighbors on its banks to deliver hard news. The creek’s headwaters are carrying lead, and the state has yet to require a binding cleanup.
Monitoring has found lead contamination in Blue Hole Creek’s headwater tributaries, traced to operations at the Highlands Sporting Clays shooting range, with readings as high as 372 parts per billion near the Laurel Highlands Hiking Trail. DEP has issued a Notice of Violation but no enforceable consent order, and the Mountain Watershed Association is running a sign-on letter campaign asking the agency to act.
A gathering at the swimming hole
In early August, MWA staff and community members met at Blue Hole Creek to walk through what the sampling shows. The picture is sobering for a stream that once carried Pennsylvania’s Exceptional Value designation, the state’s highest level of water quality protection. Lead entering the headwaters does not stay put. It settles into sediment, builds up in the bodies of aquatic insects and the fish that eat them, and disrupts the reproductive cycles that keep a stream’s food web alive.
There is a human side too. Blue Hole is a swimming destination, and the hiking trail crosses these headwaters. Backpackers routinely filter drinking water along the trail, which means people may have been filling bottles from contaminated tributaries without any way of knowing.
What the state has and has not done
According to MWA, the Department of Environmental Protection knew about the contamination for more than a year before it became public. The agency has since issued a Notice of Violation to the shooting range, and the range has reportedly begun treating contaminated soil on its property. But a Notice of Violation is a warning, not a requirement. What MWA wants is an enforceable consent order: a binding agreement with deadlines, cleanup standards, and consequences if the polluter falls short. Until that exists, progress depends on voluntary effort.
What the community is doing
MWA has opened a sign-on letter campaign urging DEP to move from warnings to enforcement. The group is asking individuals and organizations across the region to add their names, making the case that a stream this valuable, and this heavily used by the public, should not wait years for a binding cleanup plan.
Why it matters for the rest of us
Plenty of watershed groups in our network have a shooting range, a junkyard, or a legacy industrial site somewhere in their headwaters, and this case shows both the power and the limits of monitoring. Water quality data brought this problem to light, but data alone does not compel a cleanup. Sustained public pressure is what turns a Notice of Violation into an enforceable order. If your group wants to support the effort, signing the letter is a five minute contribution to a fight that could set a useful precedent for headwater protection across the Laurel Highlands.
Based on the Mountain Watershed Association’s account, Troubled Waters: a gathering at Blue Hole Creek, published September 1, 2026. Lead readings and enforcement status as reported by MWA. Current as of September 13, 2026.
