Holding Back the Snowpack

[Music] it is often said that water made the west western mountains high elevation snow storage areas permit the gradual release of water through the growing season to the great fertile valleys which nestle in this rugged country things are getting a lot drier in the west in fact some places in these last 15 years have only half the surface water they did the 15 years prior we understand ways to conserve that water that we didn't so much in the past these systems are often so dynamic they're seasonal they're wet for a few months and they're dry the rest of the year now that we can actually measure that we can see what reality actually is and it's it's something we should be concerned about [Music] [Applause] there's only so much water period and how we manage it determines and how how much benefit for all uses we get if we can be more resilient in how we store water we can actually impede some of that impact that we're seeing and beaver dam analogs and restoration and channel connectivity are all things that are massively important to make that go one of the primary goals of these projects is really being able to store water on the landscape high up in these watersheds we're trying to hold back as much water as we can so later in the year when it's a really dry month there will be more available water later in the year for ranchers recreationalists and also habitat for fish and wildlife everybody suffers because the water just isn't there you know all these studies and all these things give us some knowledge to know when we do get a year where we don't have snowpack what possibly can we do early in the year to negate some of the problems that may come later the most important thing we do is work with mother nature and we're we have to to take care of her first second we have to take care of society so we have two bosses one is society one is mother nature so you have to mimic the forces of mother nature to keep her healthy flood irrigators have been doing this work for 100 plus years and realized how to maximize water availability for themselves i'm a fourth generation rancher on the place my kids will be fifth and it's been flood irrigated since the early 1880s 1883-84 when it was homesteaded what ranchers are doing is is they're going into these places and for generations they've been spreading water across these floodplains and the same way water might spread across that floodplain during spring floods and getting that water into that sponge which is that broader extent around that creek channel so some of those techniques are already there we're trying to highlight how those techniques can be first appreciated and valued and then translated into a restoration context at different scales so we do everything from low tech beaver mimicry structures to highly mechanized flood plain reconstructions not so long ago this country of ours was covered with sloughs and marshes that served as reservoirs to hold water on the land and keep water tables high and wells full beaver abounded in the streams and ducks and geese swarmed in the marshes you can imagine even by the time lewis and clark got here we had already eliminated most of the beaver off of the landscape so the fur trade had already removed beaver from all of these tributaries and waterways [Applause] today we were putting in beaver mimicry structures in a alpine meadow and an area that historically had beavers and so we're just sort of plugging up holes in the old structures and able to create a lot of natural water storage in an area that historically had that naturally to spread out that water hold a little bit back recharge the ground water and keep it for times when it's more needed later in the season and really we're just creating just like a beaver wood we're just creating a leaky structure that slows the movement of water downstream catches sediment that sediment will pile up in front of this structure and build up the base of the stream so that this stream starts flowing a little bit higher up so that at a really high flows it'll start spilling over its banks sort of wetting more of the landscape we always refer to it as a sponge up there you know you get the sponge wet and it kind of dribbles out for quite a while think of a hydrograph in western montana generally there's a big spike in may and june and then it just is like straight downhill you know as you get into july and august as that water really is just leaving the landscape and moving downhill by creating these structures and where you see beaver influenced streams that hydrograph the top peak flows is much more rounded and it's lasts longer into the year because you're storing all that water in the soil and and the water is moving more slowly through the system there's a cfs that's quantifiable and if you start talking cfs in september august and september that's what everyone wants to hear you know i was up here on monday and the water was just confined to inside the channel there was no standing water here so you know this little structure that probably took these guys 20 minutes to build and it's saturated in here and it's perched i mean it's standing water so this water will be around a lot longer than it would have otherwise it would just been flowing downstream and it'd be way down in the big hole by now because this was the first one really large one that we planned on the forest we really wanted to do it right so we talked about uh incorporating quite a bit of monitoring into this one so we put in a couple different piezometer curtains here so we were able to monitor kind of the water table to see kind of what changes we saw based on the work that we're doing so in one case in the highland mountains where we plugged up several abandoned beaver dams we did some groundwater models we laid out some groundwater wells and using drone imagery we're able to calculate how much water we stored on the surface and in the ground that project showed us that in just a three acre flood plain we held back a third of an acre foot of water you see this pool of surface water but that's really small to the amount of water that's underground in in the soil and in the gravels and charging the whole stream bed and the whole system it's not a ton of water by itself but a bunch of these projects all over our headwater meadows would really make an impact for late season water availability deep in the earth were copper and lead and zinc iron and all the other metals with which to build a great industrial nation and there was gold in the sands of western streams because of ignorance and greed we've squandered the riches of our heritage we have wasted our timber ravaged our soil polluted our rivers [Music] so this was a very popular area for gold mining the whole french creek watershed really was hit hard and they built up these massive plaster piles and constricted this stream channel into a linear straight stream so here we're working with two excavators two dump trucks we're trying to put this system back together and and give it a push start to heal itself even more the overarching goal here is water storage for the long run and the stream uh morphology helps we're putting the meanders back in there we're putting in a ton of features that slow the water down and allow greater resonance time for the flood waters and a whole lot more infiltration meaning that water will pop out of the ground further downstream and be available much later in the summer and this is what kind of the stream looked like before our project really in size channel flood plain really perched up you can you can see the the plaster piles in here really just piled up right against the stream and these plaster piles go for days really the plaster tailings are really kind of messy to work with but yeah it does kind of look like a bomb went off this is a lot of effort just for some infiltration and some some habitat improvement on a relatively small stretch but it's part of a much bigger picture here we've got this stream that flows into that stream it's going to increase the ecological integrity for miles downstream just knowing that we have this buffer here what i think of when i think about projects in the ground like it's going on in the big hole is you're making piggy banks and so when you go into your restoration you're storing water within that watershed in ways you weren't doing before and as you store water and you create that floodplain channel health you're promoting you're creating drought resiliency and so what happens at that project scale is each time you get that flood and you're saving a little more water you put some more money in the piggy bank and then when those droughts come you have water stored that keeps those things resilient in green what we also see is a decoupling of climate and how flood plains operate what i mean by that is as you do a restoration on the ground before you do that restoration most times those systems are closely tied to climate you get a wet year you get higher flows you get green pastures you get a dry year you get lower flows you get dry pastures as those restoration practices come into play and that piggy bank gets filled up what happens is during dry years you still get green pastures because you're operating on that piggy bank i just find great satisfaction in doing work that gets that water out and soaking the soil and creates wet environments and wet habitats because we just know that that's where life that's what life needs and that's where life is you know this work of sort of holding back snowpack is sort of life-giving work [Music] we are well aware of the fact that water is essential to the well-being of all living things

Channel: Big Hole Watershed Committee

Views: 104,579

Keywords: natural water storage, snowpack, stream restoration, wetland restoration, floodplains, restoration, conservation, nonprofit, conservation nonprofit, big hole watershed, big hole watershed committee, big hole river, big hole valley, montana, fish & wildlife, mount haggin, mount haggin wma, mount haggin wildlife management area

Id: UG8YWqSHF88

Length: 11min 37sec (697 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 19 2020