Written by Iman Chatila, Wild Stew Field Crew Member.
Imagine a 36-ton pile of rocks by the road, delivered from a mine. First you pick up one rock and carry it to the truck. Then you drive down an atrocious pipeline road. You unload the rock and carry it down the wash. Finally, it sits in its final resting place, nestled in a one rock dam you built. Then you do it again. And again! In eight days, each of the seven people on our crew has easily handled thousands of rocks. That’s one sure way to get a case of Brain Rock.
Muleshoe Ranch Preserve is a beautiful ecological gem tucked in the southern foothills of the Galiuro Mountains. Surrounded by arid upper Sonoran Desert, many wildlife species benefit from its seven perennial streams, such as skunk, fox, javelina, ringtail, deer, jackrabbits, cougar, bobcats, frogs, snakes, lowland leopard frogs, yellowbilled cuckoo, and a wide variety of native fish, including the endangered Gila topminnow and loach minnow. The area used to be homestead and ranch land. In 1982 it was purchased by The Nature Conservancy as part of a Cooperative Management Agreement with the Bureau of Land Management and Coronado National Forest. Since then, the area has been closed to grazing and hunting in order to restore the natural biodiversity.
An important part of maintaining and restoring biodiversity is stabilizing soils and holding water in the ground, allowing plants to get a good foothold with access to water, instead of rainwater quickly running off the land down deeply incised gullies. In the southwest, this can be caused by stream capture by low-standard “two-track” roads, livestock trails, and old wagon roads. (Zeedyk, W. D. (2006). A Good Road Lies Easy on the Land: Water Harvesting from Low Standard Rural Roads. Santa Fe, NM: The Quivira Coalition.)
Muleshoe Ranch Manager Jeff Smith directed us to some areas with major erosion issues to be addressed. Sure enough, these washes became channelized due to the unsustainable roads and grazing which caused native species loss. In some areas, we had seen remnants of a dead hackberry tree and a dying ash tree, demonstrating that the area was once riparian, with a slow-moving channel delivering water to the soil. Now, water shoots straight down the channel during flood events, quickly washing away the loose sediment and causing further incision. Rainfall on an arid landscape does no good for the plants if it doesn’t stay long enough to get absorbed by roots. In order to slow the water down and allow sediment to be deposited, leading to future revegetation, we built over 130 rock structures (one rock dams, zuni bowls, boulder vanes, media lunas, and filter dams) and installed wooden posts in seven meander-creating structures called vanes.
This technique has been carefully documented in the book Let the Water Do the Work: Induced Meandering, an Evolving Method for Restoring Incised Channels, by Bill Zeedyk and Van Clothier. Their years of experience are used to explain what has been shown to work (structures that slow down water flow) and what doesn’t work (short term mechanical solutions such as gabions which eventually fail).
While our work is informed by these techniques, it is still experimental because this is a somewhat new practice for us. Certainly we will learn much from what we have made, and many more structures would be beneficial in this unique and biodiverse area. Wild Arizona hopes to return to this project, to see how our work has held up through some storms, and continue to restore this beautiful place!
