The Craig Creek Cluster is a region recognized by The Wilderness Society for its unique high elevation mountains, vistas, trout streams and wildlife habitat.

[1] Popular for hiking, canoeing, mountain biking, hunting, horseback riding, and fishing, the area offers an opportunity for secluded recreation.

[5] Biodiversity in the southern Appalachians is being threatened by the cutting down of forests, damming off rivers and the paving of land for farms and towns, leading to the loss of species by fragmentation of the ecological landscape.

[6] Rare species found in the area of the Craig Creek Cluster include a variety of flora and fauna--mussels, the Atlantic Pigtoe and James Spineymussel; a fish, the Orange Madtom; mammals, the northern long-eared Myotis and the Indiana Bat;, and a vascular plant, the small whorled pogonia.

[8]: xxi The ridges of the New Castle District were once covered with a forest composed of about 50% chestnut trees, often growing as high as 120 feet with a 10-foot diameter.

[8]: 82 Between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, industrial woodcutting supplied charcoal firing for iron making.

Then construction of railroads in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries supported the intensive cutting of trees on an industrial level leading to degradation of much of the forests in southwest Virginia.