Resistance to the Mountain Valley Pipeline through West Virginia and Virginia took the form of the longest blockades in American environmental history: tree-sits and monopod perches on steep Appalachian ridgelines, including the Yellow Finch tree-sits near Elliston, Virginia, which held the easement for 932 days until extracted in March 2021. The final two sitters were jailed on contempt, and courts imposed escalating daily fines designed to make aerial resistance financially impossible.

Judges hearing the cases increasingly treated the protests as attacks on a federally sanctioned project rather than trespass against a private company — a shift completed in 2023 when Congress ordered the pipeline's completion by statute. Dozens of blockaders, from college students to a 64-year-old grandmother who locked herself to construction equipment, served jail time or probation. The campaign did not stop the pipeline, which entered service in 2024, but it delayed it for years and trained a generation of Appalachian land defenders in the legal costs of direct action.