Off a Sweetwater County highway on a gravel road is Nick Walrath. He’s standing by his truck on a recent summer morning, coffee cup in hand. A hand drawn fish lines the side.
“Yeah, a brown trout,” he chuckled. “That’s from my daughter, she drew it. She did a really good job.”
Walrath is all about fish and the outdoors. He’s born and raised in Wyoming and works as the Green River Senior Project Manager for Trout Unlimited. It’s a nonprofit that focuses on keeping creeks and rivers healthy – not just for fish, but other wildlife and humans, too.
“Water is the most valuable asset in the West,” he said.
That’s because drought has plagued the West for more than 20 years. So holding onto that water is key, which is what Walrath and his team are trying to figure out how to do here.
It’s a water restoration project about 10 years in the making. The goal is to restore the surrounding habitat and ultimately hold water on the landscape longer.
And as Walrath and his team have found, one way to address that? Humans acting like beavers.
“Where we're going today is Sage Creek,” he said. “Sage Creek is [a] tributary to Flaming Gorge.”
Flaming Gorge is the first major water reservoir along the Colorado River system, which about 40 million people south of Wyoming depend on.
The Trout Unlimited project, fueled most recently by a $1.5 million federal grant, aims to restore 5.6 miles of it in the coming years. We drive to a spot where the issue is on full display.
“You can see these big, big cliffs Sage Creek has down cut over the last, oh, 50 to 60 years,” Walrath said.
It’s like a mini Grand Canyon. Sandy, 20-foot walls tower over a small creek. It should be a lazy, meandering stream at normal ground level. But over the years, fire, drought, decline in beaver populations and even fluctuations in the Flaming Gorge reservoir have degraded the habitat. That has caused the creek to carve deeper and deeper into the land.
“The goal of this project is to get the bottom of Sage Creek lifted up to where it used to be,” he said.
Lifting the creek lets water soak into the surrounding desert landscape. Vegetation grows for wildlife and livestock, and fish can seek out the slower, cooler water.
But to recreate that oasis takes time and hard work.
We drive upstream to take a peek at what’s already been done. We only make it a few miles before bumping into a carload of some tired, but passionate, travelers.
“It’s been hard work, but hard work well spent,” said 19-year-old Grace Pieper of Casper.
Pieper and the six others are with the Wyoming Conservation Corps. They just spent the past nine days on this project, basically building beaver dams to help lift the creek.
“Weaving willows through posts, and stuffing them down so the water table rises and the current isn't so strong,” Pieper said. “We just create a wall.”
When they first showed up, the creek was at their ankles. But 19-year-old Autumn Pryor of Cheyenne said in some places it’s now at their hips, which lets the surrounding landscape act like a giant sponge.
“And so you can see how instead of it just being dry, it's covered in that little bit of water just as we were wanting,” Pryor said. “And as time goes on, it'll continue to bring water into that area.”
And, ideally, encourage beavers to move in and take over the manual labor side of things. Which, at least this human crew would be happy to hand over. It was food and music that kept them going.
“What was the song that you kept listening to after we hiked back?” several members asked Achilles Hennessy, the Cheyenne-based crew leader for the group.
“Beer Never Broke my Heart,” Hennessy chuckled. “I played that on repeat while cooking burgers. An hour and a half of that song.”
The rest of the group yelled out, “Oh, it was terrible!” But then begrudgingly started singing the Luke Combs hit with Hennessy.
All in all, the crew helped build almost 50 dams over their stint. We part ways with the group and Walrath drives us upstream. We can see the man-made beaver dams for miles.
“So we were just at dam 110,” Walrath said. Some of the other dams were built over the last four years. “We're gonna go up to dam one.”
Dam number one was built in 2020. It’s ground zero for the project, and a testament to show that it can work.
At the site it’s an oasis in the desert.
Lush, green vegetation is surrounding the creek. There’s large pools of water. Baby ducks swimming. Fish darting.
“We built a small beaver dam and that was probably a foot or so,” Walrath said as he pointed it out. “Then the beavers have built a four to five foot dam, kind of on top, and now it's nearly up to grade of where the stream used to be historically."
That’s the vision: Build the man-made dams. Restore the waterway’s health. Have the beavers take over. It’s a cycle Walrath thinks could play out over the next decade or so.
It’s just a little slice of the pie along the Colorado River system. But Walrath said it’s a model that could easily be recreated and already is in some places like Utah and Nevada.
