Bringing Wetlands Back to Life

For years, people have fought just to stop the losses. But a growing number of projects scattered throughout the state, including the Valle Vidal, have begun to reverse the tide, restoring some of these precious wet pockets with volunteers and, occasionally, big machines to move heaven and tons of earth. Nonprofits including the Quivira Coalition, Trout Unlimited, Amigos Bravos, and Rio Grande Return often take the lead with an assist from almost half a dozen upstart companies doing hydrologically minded earthwork. All of it occurs in cooperation with federal and state land management and environmental agencies like the U.S. Forest Service and the New Mexico Environment Department. 

“This is a really loved landscape,” Walton says, looking out over the Valle Vidal meadow. “People have been putting a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into making it better.”

VALLE VIDAL’S VAST, GRASSY BASINS ONCE FED tens of thousands of grazing sheep and cattle, and even once hosted a mining town with hundreds of residents. That history left an imprint. Fibrous roots on wetlands plants trap rich topsoil and moisture. Hooves can shear through those roots, human footfalls and motorized ATVs cut into them, and roads and mines can obliterate them completely. Shredding that web opens the ground to sun, wind, and water. Topsoil washes away, and as the remaining dirt becomes too hot and dry for seeds to grow, still more ground and water go.

“Devastating,” Walton says to the last small clumps of grass hanging on.

A tiny step-down in the stream like an ankle-high waterfall, perhaps cut by a hoof, wears away soil and slices across meadows and wetlands. The streams that once meandered through and soaked into the ground now funnel into a single, steadily deepening channel. Instead of snowmelt and rainfall taking months to trickle away, water rushes through those tight corridors in fast, fierce pulses. Wetlands that once sprawled across entire valleys dwindled to remnants of water-loving vegetation near springs and seeps, if they’re able to hang on at all.

Much of the wisdom around how to restore healthier, wetter ecosystems in New Mexico comes from one person who loved and fought for Valle Vidal. Bill Zeedyk spent a career as a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Forest Service, even working on the team that transitioned the Valle Vidal from private playground to public land in 1982. The 90-year-old has spent his retirement crafting and teaching a suite of techniques that mostly use natural materials like rocks, logs, and sod to encourage the ground to hold onto more of its water. 

Those techniques include building a curving, loose rock structure or a triangle of downed logs to split and spread the flow of water. A layer of rock or a mat of logs resembling a raft sunk into the mud can raise and stabilize a streambed. Bricks of sod sprouting with sedges packed into a channel can spill more water into nearby wetlands. Half-bowl-like rock structures, called Zuni bowls, stop streams from slicing open a meadow. Zeedyk’s 2009 book, co-authored with Van Clothier, owner of environmental engineering company Stream Dynamics, spells out the principles in the title, Let the Water Do the Work: Induced Meandering, an Evolving Method for Restoring Incised Channels.

For nearly 20 years, the nonprofit Quivira Coalition, which supports ecologically attuned ranching, fishing nonprofit Trout Unlimited, and other groups have used those ideas to halt erosion in Valle Vidal and deploy new strategies to “re-wet” historic wetlands. All of it was done with an eye toward restoring those ecosystems while cattle still graze them. 

For Walton, a former staffer with the Quivira Coalition, the work blended her own family ranching history with her PhD in biology. She’s walked the entire length of all but one tributary in the 43-square-mile watershed. That meant bushwhacking over toppled trees and uneven ground to the headwaters of about 15 streams that funnel into the watershed’s centerpiece, Comanche Creek.

Before restoration starts in a particular stream or wetlands, Walton photographs the area. Pictures and surveys of project sites document where wetlands plants like juncus, sedges, and rushes were growing and where the landscape transitioned to species—spruce trees, Kentucky bluegrass, dandelions, dwarf juniper, and cinquefoil—that prefer drier ground. “If we’re successful in keeping more water in the landscape, that line is going to move up the slope,” she says. No replanting is required: “Just give it a chance and it’ll take hold.”

Even the gopher holes shift uphill as revived wetlands fill with thick grasses, boggy ground, and boot-sucking mud. At one newly swampy patch, water glistens through a messy pile of trees deliberately downed to deter cattle and elk from stomping through, giving the vegetation a chance to grow. Between the tangled branches, shoulder-high willows reach for the sun.

Elsewhere, fences shield some woody riparian vegetation like Bebb’s willow from grazing animals. Boxed in, the multistemmed shrubs have grown to five feet tall over three summers and have begun to capture moisture as a living snow fence. Where their twiggy red limbs and leaves stick out of the enclosure, they’re pruned back like garden hedges by gnawing herbivores. The hope is that the willows can grow big enough to tolerate heavy browsing and the fences can come down. Then, they’ll look like the few dotting the meadow that are decades older and survive in a broccoli shape after all their branches have been eaten away up to elk-head height.

While it may not seem like much to the untrained eye, these gains are markers of wetlands success. There are bigger victories too. Take Comanche Creek, where water quality had declined to such a point that it no longer supported fish and aquatic insects. In 2000, it was placed on the New Mexico Environment Department’s water quality list for impaired water quality. Over the next few years, Quivira Coalition installed more than 50 small cattle exclosures, 120 post vanes (a series of fence-post-like poles that protect streambanks), several Zuni bowls, and another 75 erosion control structures along about seven miles of Comanche Creek. By 2008, sediment levels had improved enough that it was removed from the state’s list. 

In the Quivira Coalition’s first decade of work, in fact, more than 150 volunteers worked about 2,400 hours to build almost 400 erosion-reduction structures and replant willows along three miles of streambank, according to a report by co-founder and then executive director Courtney White. He noted dramatic recovery of wet meadows, resurgent wetlands vegetation to shade trout habitat, clearer and cooler streamflows, and increased diversity and quantity of streambank vegetation. A 2019 study published in the journal Restoration Ecology used satellite images of similar restoration projects in Colorado, Oregon, and Nevada that estimated a 25 percent increase in nearby vegetation productivity—a key indicator of ecosystem health. 

As much ground has been gained, the scale of need remains daunting, both for new projects and to adjust or repair existing ones. While Quivira and others have learned to target waterways where a little restoration work can make the biggest difference, the massive fens that once covered entire valley floors may not return. 

“There’s a big limit on what we can do just based on how far gone the system is,” Walton says, noting that what was once unbroken land may now be bisected by a road, for example.

When Mark Torres, vice president of the Valle Vidal Grazing Association, rides in with cattle and fellow ranchers each June, however, he points out where previous projects have greened up the land. He knows where to look after participating in many of the volunteer days over the past decade. “I’ve seen big changes every year, every time there’s a project,” Torres says. “It’s really benefitted us—and I know wildlife benefits, the people fishing benefit, carbon capture, all that.”

The grazing association, which pools resources for the roughly eight families with herds that browse Valle Vidal’s grass all summer, steers cattle away from new restoration projects for a year to give plants some time to sprout. The association also hires a range rider to live in the Valle and herd cattle away from creeks.

“When it’s dry, of course the cows want to be down there where it’s green and there’s water,” Torres says. “They’re lazy.” 

Cattle contribute to erosion, but as he points out, so do elk and poorly built mountain-bike trails. And cattle stay for four months, while elk browse year-round. It’s also true that a century ago, ranchers didn’t recognize the damage they were doing to the wetlands when they were digging stock ponds in the fens and encouraging cattle to congregate alongside creeks by putting nutrient-rich salt and minerals nearby.  

Now, Torres says, ranchers have learned to station those minerals on hilltops. They only graze half the Valle Vidal each year and try to keep the grass from being eaten below four inches in height, reducing strains on the system. The association even bought three water tanks so cattle don’t need to drink from the creeks, but it is still gathering funds to install them.

“It’s crazy, though,” says Torres, who notes that ranchers are basically grass farmers who harvest that grass through beef. So it’s good to know how to grow more of it. “There’s places where cowboys have ridden by and seen water just running down in a creek and never thought that you could get off your horse, put a few rocks in it, slow the water down, spread the water, and increase forage.” 

On a mid-August day at Midnight Meadows, a grassy valley perched in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains south of Valle Vidal, about 50 volunteers emerge from tents and campers into drizzling rain. As the sun burns through the morning storm, they hike out along the stream, hauling or occasionally tossing rocks and downed trees into streambanks, piling up building supplies. Most find themselves in frigid water and splattered in mud, wedging rocks together like puzzle pieces.

Rachel Conn, deputy director of Amigos Bravos, a Taos water conservation nonprofit, has coordinated restoration events for two decades. She started with keeping off-road vehicles from chewing up meadows and now works on rebuilding what the organization has dubbed “wetland jewels.” Today, she’s leading friends and volunteers in the goal to “slow and spread” the water. 

Rocks fitted into place across the streambed create hydrological speed bumps. As water slows, it sheds sediment. These one-rock dams will disappear into mud of their own making after a few seasons of runoff and rainstorms. “It’s cool to see how much it’s changed in a year,” says one volunteer, walking the stream alongside a friend. “You think it’s not going to make a difference.”

A few others head out to straighten fences that winter snow and animals have tilted. The grass has been eaten low and the ground dimpled with hoofprints up to the fence line, but inside the boxes they draw around sections of streambank, grass has grown tall enough to riffle in the breeze. These exclosures balance leaving water access for cattle while reducing erosion.

Restoration doesn’t always work perfectly on the first try, and these practices are still evolving. Sometimes, rocks and logs require repositioning to function as intended. The wear of snowmelt and summer storms may also require mending. Sometimes, the seasons just aren’t rainy or snowy enough to produce much water and sedimentary dirt. “It’s a process,” Conn says. “You’ve got to come back.”

So, every summer since 2006, they do, checking on, adjusting, and adding to the previous seasons’ structures at Midnight Meadows. When it works, the additional grass is downright exciting. That’s especially true for someone like Conn, who has watched the landscape shift over seasons and learned to love the damp and squishy places. 

Standing along one creek, she holds her hand above the brim of her hat. Ground level came up to here, she says, noting how deeply incised the channel had been. Known as “the big hole,” the area had all but lost its “wetland magic powers,” she says. 

Volunteers can handle much of the work, but in some places and for problems like the big hole, machines can make for faster progress. After a backhoe reconfigured the streambank, the creek ambles around a wide curve. Tromping through the soggy ground, Conn says, “This is wet. This is great.”

On the far western side of the Carson National Forest near Tres Piedras, the Río San Antonio curves through a horseshoe-shaped valley. A yellow backhoe grumbles along the streambank. The operator dips a bucket into the water, scoops up gravel and mud, and pours the contents across the stream. He goes back for more in the clouded water. A few tamps with the bucket pack down a rocky peninsula. Soon, water swirls and slows behind it.

Craig Sponholtz, wetlands restoration designer and founder of Watershed Artisans, has spent two summers on this roughly seven-mile stretch of Río San Antonio. Where restoration work has required construction equipment from companies like Watershed Artisans, major state and federal grants and even private funding have invested in these solutions. In this case, Trout Unlimited secured funding from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation for watershed studies—looking for trout-friendly waters—and habitat support. They were searching for Río Grande cutthroat trout, a native species found in only about 12 percent of waterways it once occupied. Remaining populations are closely monitored.

Restoration work in Valle Vidal, to which Trout Unlimited also contributed, celebrated the release of more than 10,250 Río Grande cutthroat into its streams in 2023 as a mark of success. Now, sights are set on new waters, including the Río San Antonio. “We had been hearing rumors that there were cutthroat in here,” says Garrett Hanks, northern New Mexico program manager for Trout Unlimited. “And we were like, ‘Oh, that’s cool. They’re not on the list [of known cutthroat habitats].’ ”

With a closer look, Trout Unlimited found genetically pure Río Grande cutthroat, but also often noted water temperatures high enough to kill fish. So the backhoe digs deeper pools to catch and cool water. Sponholtz also looks for ways to give the single thread of a stream a chance to braid its way across its historic floodplain, where long-abandoned channels reveal themselves only as places where the grass dips. He’s coaxed the water to detour around gravel bars, giving it a chance to soak into and then drip back out of the soil, much appreciated in late summer. 

“The more space [the creek] has, the more resilient and adaptive it’s going to be in the future in the face of whatever comes,” Sponholtz says. 

“Resilience flows downstream, not just water,” adds Nessa Rasmussen, watershed program manager for the Carson National Forest. She invited a dozen people out to the Río San Antonio to see the work and better understand these processes and the transformations they create. Embedded in the ecology are lessons in how much more widely that resilience can matter. 

“The water future of Albuquerque—and of every city in New Mexico—is right here,” Sponholtz says. “You don’t have to be an angler or a hunter or a hiker or anything else to appreciate the value of retaining this water.”

But creeks throughout the Southwest are slicing into their own meadows, leaving bare banks and dangling roots. Even walking along Holman Creek, one of the worksites in Valle Vidal, Walton can point to places that are deteriorating, like stream channels incised more than thigh deep. 

“We walked through all of these tributaries, and we identified all of these problem places, and there were hundreds—hundreds of places—and I think we ended up doing 29 structures with the money we had,” she says. “The need is great, and all we’re doing is putting in little stitches everywhere, but the patient’s still bleeding out in many ways.” 

She knows of one project where, over 20 years, a deep channel regained 10 feet of sediment. Looking at one of those deep stream channels, she says, “If we did something like that here, within 20 years, we could have this channel back up to grade with just patience and perseverance and faith—and physics.”

To reach the scale of an increasingly arid Southwest, the effort needs more of everything—more money, more volunteers—and less stress on the system by forces like overgrazing. That need means, as Rasmussen says, “We all have opportunities to get there on the ground and get dirty and get wet.”

The work gives the land a chance to heal itself, she says, but the work of every individual who shows up to help mend that one beloved river bend or wet meadow feels to her like it amplifies, both in helping each other and in building momentum for bigger change. 

“I have a really hard time not getting teary about it, honestly,” Rasmussen says, hiking along the Río San Antonio’s newly knee-high grasses. “I don’t know what I did right in my life to end up here, but I must have done something, because there is just this tremendous energy around this kind of work in these places that are so critical to our climate resilience and water security.” 

Freelance writer Elizabeth Miller has reported on water in the West for more than a decade.