Nick Walrath is lying on a gravel road off a highway in Sweetwater County. On a summer morning, he stands next to his truck with a cup of coffee in his hand. A hand-drawn fish lines the side.
“Yes, a brown trout,” he giggled. “It’s my daughter’s, she drew it. She did a really good job.”
Walrath is all about fish and the outdoors. Born and raised in Wyoming, he works as a senior project manager for Green River at Trout Unlimited, a nonprofit organization dedicated to keeping streams and rivers healthy – not just for fish, but also for other wildlife and people.
“Water is the West’s most valuable commodity,” he said.
This is because drought has been affecting the West since more than 20 years. So the key is to hold back that water, and that’s exactly what Walrath and his team are trying to figure out here.
It is a water restoration project that will take approximately 10 years to build, with the goal of restoring the surrounding habitat and ultimately keeping water in the landscape longer.
And Walrath and his team have discovered that there is a way to counteract this problem: people behave like beavers.
“Today we’re going to Sage Creek,” he said. “Sage Creek is a tributary of Flaming Gorge.”
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Public Media in Wyoming
Flaming Gorge is the first major water reservoir in the Colorado River system, on which approximately 40 million people south of Wyoming depend.
The Trout Unlimited Projectwhich was recently funded by a federal grant of $1.5 million, is expected to rehabilitate 9 km of it in the coming years. We drive to a place where the problem is clearly visible.
“You can see these huge cliffs that Sage Creek has eroded over the last, say, 50 to 60 years,” Walrath said.
It’s like a miniature Grand Canyon. Sandy, 20-foot-high walls rise above a small stream. At normal ground level, it should be a sluggish, meandering body of water. But over the years, fire, drought, declining beaver populations, and even fluctuations in the Flaming Gorge reservoir have destroyed the habitat, causing the stream to dig deeper and deeper into the land.
“The goal of this project is to raise the bottom of Sage Creek to its original elevation,” he said.
Raising the creek allows water to penetrate the surrounding desert landscape, allowing vegetation to grow and accommodate wildlife and livestock, and allowing fish to seek out the slower, cooler water.
But restoring this oasis will take time and hard work.
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Public Media in Wyoming
We head upriver to take a look at what has already been done, and we only manage a few miles before we come across a car full of tired but passionate travelers.
“It was hard work, but the hard work was worth it,” said 19-year-old Grace Pieper of Casper.
Pieper and the six others are with the Wyoming Conservation Corps. They just spent the last nine days on this project, essentially building beaver dams to raise the creek.
“We weave willows through posts and tamp them down so that the water table rises and the current is not so strong,” said Pieper. “We simply build a wall.”
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Public Media in Wyoming
When they first emerged, the creek was up to their ankles, but 19-year-old Autumn Pryor of Cheyenne says in some places it is now up to their waists, making the surrounding landscape look like a giant sponge.
“And so you can see that it’s not just dry, it’s covered with a little bit of water, just like we wanted,” Pryor said. “And over time, it will continue to bring water into this area.”
And ideally encourage beavers to settle down and take over the manual labor. At least this human crew would be happy to hand it over. It was food and music that kept them alive.
“What song did you hear over and over again after we hiked back?” several members asked Achilles Hennessy, the group leader based in Cheyenne.
“Beer Never Broke my Heart,” Hennessy giggled. “I had that on repeat while I was cooking burgers. An hour and a half of that song.”
The rest of the group shouted, “Oh, it was awful!” but then reluctantly began singing Luke Combs’ hit with Hennessy.
In total, the crew helped build almost 50 dams during their shift. We split up from the group and Walrath drove us upstream. The man-made beaver dams can be seen for miles.
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Public Media in Wyoming
“We were just at Dam 110,” Walrath said. Some of the other dams were built in the last four years. “We will go to Dam One.”
Dam number one was built in 2020. It is the starting point of the project and proof that it can work.
It is an oasis in the desert.
The stream is surrounded by lush green vegetation. There are large pools of water. Ducklings swim. Fish dart around.
“We built a small beaver dam that was probably about a foot high,” said Walrath, pointing to it. “Then the beavers built a 4- to 5-foot-high dam on top of it, which is now almost at the level the stream used to be.”
Caitlin Tan
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Public Media in Wyoming
That’s the vision: Build the artificial dams. Restore the waterways. Let the beavers take over. Walrath believes this cycle could play out over the next ten years or so.
It’s just a small piece of the pie along the Colorado River system. But Walrath said it’s a model that can be easily replicated and is already being implemented in some places, like Utah And Nevada.
