After the 2020 Pine Gulch Fire scorched 95,000 drought-stricken acres of High Lonesome Ranch in Garfield and Mesa Counties, the rainstorms that followed eroded hillsides and washed mud and rocks into the Dry Fork Creek valley bottom.
“It was a major impact to operations here,” said High Lonesome’s General Manager Travis Brooks. “The wildlife habitat obviously was erased, populations disappeared… The flooding, the debris flows, the devastation that comes after the fire is almost as bad as the fire itself and we’re still seeing the effects of that.”
Brooks has overseen work to repair the riparian corridor and control erosion; now the area is green and wildlife – including beavers – have returned to the watershed. The area’s recovery is due, in part, to a piece of 2023 legislation that cleared the way for minor stream restoration projects in Colorado. High Lonesome Ranch is the site of one of the first of these types of projects completed since the passage of Senate Bill 270.
In 2023, Colorado lawmakers recognized the need to restore the environmental health of the state’s waterways, especially after wildfires. The legislation allows minor stream restoration projects to take place without being subject to water rights administration, provided they meet certain criteria. But this is uncharted legal territory and early projects are highlighting old tensions between water rights holders and proponents of stream restoration.
The Dry Fork Creek project, which is wrapping up its third and final year of work on High Lonesome Ranch, was spearheaded by Audubon Rockies.
Over three years, crews installed about 200 simple, porous structures over two miles of stream, with the goal of trapping sediment, slowing the flow of water, raising the water table and rewetting the sponge of the floodplain. The structures, sometimes called Beaver Dam Analogues for the way they can mimic beaver activity, are built by weaving willows and tree branches across the channel between posts hammered into the streambed.
The official name for these low-tech, process-based restoration methods is Post-Assisted Log Structures, and they can turn a deeply incised, V-shaped stream with steep banks into a wider, gently sloping, U-shaped streambed. The structures act as speed bumps for the torrents that wash down the valley during summer storms and can improve watersheds that have been degraded by fire as well as human activities like road building and cattle grazing.
“I really do believe that we’re improving the water quality out here by doing this work, which is helpful to everybody downstream,” Brooks said. “I think that’s the biggest takeaway.”
On a sunny day in late September, Abby Burk, Western Rivers program director for Audubon, led a tour of the flagship project, showing how stream restoration is put into practice under the new legislation.
“All of these different types of structures are really looking at arresting sediment, holding sediment, spreading water on the landscape and slowing it down so that we can have a bit more of a connected floodplain,” Burk said.
Putting policy into practice
Senate Bill 23-270 allows for six categories of minor stream restoration activities, such as stabilizing the banks or reconstructing a channel of a natural stream system. If a project falls under one of the six categories, it is presumed to not harm other water users and can move forward with little scrutiny from state officials.
Environmental groups that worked on the legislation had originally wanted to set a size standard for stream restoration based on the historical footprint of the floodplain before it was degraded. But opponents, some of whom were agricultural water users, argued this area was too large and ill-defined, and floated the idea of placing a cap on how much new surface area of water that projects were allowed to create. Their concern was that projects could create more surface area for evaporation and reduce streamflows.
That’s a problem because in Colorado’s system of water law where the oldest rights get first use of rivers, water is usually already spoken for by someone downstream. Without SB 270, stream restoration proponents could have to go through an expensive and lengthy process to buy into an augmentation plan, which replaces the water consumed by evaporation.
The final bill represented a compromise between the two sides, and required that these minor restoration projects don’t back up water past the “ordinary high-water mark” of the stream.
“I think this is an elegant compromise,” said Burk, who helped shape the bill. “We landed at a bipartisan solution that was unanimously supported.”
Immediately after the passage of the bill, stream restoration proponents were disappointed in the final version. But in the three years since, SB 270 seems to be providing the necessary legal and political cover for groups to move forward with low-tech, process-based projects, with several underway on the Western Slope.
“We started taking more time to process it and read it, and then we actually realized, you know, I think we actually got something pretty good here that we’re going to be able to do some great stuff with,” said Jackie Corday, a natural resources consultant who worked on the bill and the Dry Fork Creek project.
Downstream conflicts
As more groups take on projects under SB 270, it means the bounds of the legislation will be tested as potential conflicts arise with downstream water users.
On a Saturday in late August, the National Forest Foundation and Roaring Fork Outdoor Volunteers kicked off another restoration project, installing about 40 PALS in the White River National Forest in the headwaters of Middle Thompson Creek, a tributary of the Crystal River. The area was identified as a prime spot for stream restoration in a beaver inventory conducted in 2023 and 2024 by the U.S. Forest Service and funded by Pitkin County.
“Ideally, the changes in the channel that these [structures] provoke, and the changes in the vegetation will be enough to make those areas attractive to beaver again and beaver will just recolonize the site,” said Clay Ramey, a fisheries biologist with the White River National Forest.
The Forest Service is planning another, similar project next year in the headwaters of Four Mile Creek, one drainage over from Thompson Creek. But the size and scope of the proposed project has raised concerns from a local water conservancy district. The Rifle-based West Divide Water Conservancy District owns several small reservoirs and provides supplemental irrigation water and augmentation water for domestic water users.
West Divide says the project could impact water supply for its planned expansion of Martin Reservoirs. It contends the work would increase both the surface area of the stream, which causes evaporation, and the water consumed by wetland vegetation.
In a January letter to the state Division of Water Resources Division 5 Engineer Tyler Benton, the conservancy district said that the 152 structures planned over three phases is outside the scope of what is allowed by SB 270 and asks state officials to assess the project’s potential for injuring water rights holders.
“It’s not the healthiest stream by any stretch and so some restoration efforts are in order,” said West Divide board member Chris Treese. “But we don’t want those efforts to result in an impact to our water rights or any other water rights downstream that are within the West Divide district.”
More data needed
Part of the source of the disagreement comes from a lack of data about how exactly these types of projects that mimic beaver activity influence how water moves through valley bottoms.
Joel Sholtes, a water resources engineer and instructor at Colorado Mesa University, is aiming to answer that question. In August he was awarded a three-year $15,000 grant from Pitkin County Healthy Rivers to study how beaver activity alters ecosystems in the North Thompson Creek area. The sites with beavers can be a reference point to compare with areas restored by humans.
Sholtes will take seasonal measurements to try to better understand how much water beaver ponds detain, how it changes throughout the year and the differences in stream conditions between areas with resident beavers and those without. Sholtes’ early findings on a long-term study of headwaters across the state show that restoration projects do not produce large or sustained reductions in streamflow.
“The evolution and passing of SB 270 became contentious, and that conversation brought to bear a lot of knowledge gaps that we have related to stream restoration in headwaters,” Sholtes said. “There’s just not a big, robust body of literature, so the study’s number one effort is to address that in whatever ways we can. It’s not going to answer the question definitively, but it’s going to bring more data and nuance to the conversation.”
The Forest Service is monitoring and measuring the streamflows at the Four Mile project site to see what they are dealing with and the effects of their work – information West Divide is also interested in – with the intention of installing the first structures next summer.
For now, Burk says SB 270 is a good tool to accomplish 75% to 80% of the stream restoration projects that happen in Colorado. Most of these fall under three of the legislation’s six categories: stabilizing the streambanks with natural materials that allow water to flow downstream and don’t back up water past the ordinary high-water mark; stabilizing an intermittent stream by installing porous structures into the banks; and installing structures or reconstructing a stream channel for recovery from a wildfire or flood.
“This was designed for a subset of projects that are the majority to go forward because of the ecological and community benefits and watershed benefits,” Burk said.
A working group led by Burk and Corday has also created a training manual for best practices that groups can use to make sure their projects stay within the bounds of SB 270.
Communication with DWR essential
So what happens when restoration proponents believe their project fits within these parameters, but downstream water users argue the project goes too far?
Division of Water Resources officials have a limited role in refereeing these types of disagreements. Project proponents are not required to get approval from state officials and state officials do not have the authority to approve or deny projects. But as the administrator of the state’s water rights, DWR officials could still force a project to be removed if they determine it is harming downstream water users or require the project to get an augmentation plan from a water court that replaces the water it uses.
In the case of the Four Mile project, Division 5 Engineer Tyler Benton wrote in a February letter to Ramey that he does not have sufficient information to determine if the project would harm downstream water users, but that the Forest Service should communicate with the local DWR water commissioner to ensure the project complies with the law.
Both Burk and Ramey stressed the importance of communication and transparency with DWR officials to ensure the projects are in compliance with SB 270 from the beginning. Ramey said the water commissioner has visited both the Middle Thompson and Four Mile sites and is familiar with the projects.
Back at High Lonesome Ranch, beavers have moved back into the restored area and created ponds, amplifying the humans’ restoration work. Brooks said the project fits with the ranch’s philosophy of conservation and regenerative ranching, and he has aspirations of doing more work to revitalize the property’s other fire-damaged drainages in the future.
“The beaver activity that we saw is a big indication that we’re doing something right,” Brooks said. “Wildlife are coming back and utilizing the space the way a healthy riparian system should be utilized.”
