Backyard Creek Restoration

Kara transplanted to SE Utah in 1993 to caretake a ranch near Moab.  She started working with local land managers and residents in the mid 90s and helped start what became Rim to Rim Restoration in 2023.  Her formal training in Landscape Architecture and City Planning with a focus on stream restoration in urban settings led her to Mill Creek, among other places, where she still spends a lot of time working and hiking.  

Rim to Rim Restoration

Wildland Scapes LLC

Moab Bee Inspired Gardens

Science Moab joined Kara Dohrenwend, director of Rim to Rim Restoration, along Pack Creek one morning to discuss creek science and restoration in the Moab area.

Dohrenwend: Rim to Rim Restoration started after seeing the creek corridors full of Russian olive and tamarisk back in the 90s and realizing that it was a huge missed opportunity and asset in the community.  Moab is here because of the creeks yet the creeks had been forgotten.

The fabric of the community is the main interest in the creek projects that we do. Russian Olive was brought in a long time ago by what was then called the Soil Conservation Service for erosion control purposes. Tamarisk moved in on its own.

Around 2004, APHIS, the USDA program, brought in a tamarisk leaf beetle. The state of Utah had all the weed supervisors all over the state collect the tamarisk leaf beetle and distribute it throughout the state.  But there is no biological control for Russian olive it has a more extensive niche that it can fill. It can grow right next to the creek and it can grow in an upland area that barely gets water and it germinates in the shade. Whereas cottonwoods don’t. So it made it such that the creek corridors really were a thicket you had to crawl through.

While there’s an ecological and wildlife benefit to removing the tamarisk and russian olive, what really gets us some funding is the fact that those things are pretty intensive ladder fuels.  they’re in the way of restoring the creek corridors, the ecological function, the hydrologic function, the flood flow function, but what actually appeals to human beings to remove them is that they can act like a wick. 

Science Moab: so a lot of the Russian olive was removed years ago. But today, you’re out here replanting, I assume mainly willow, what are you planting? 

Dohrenwend:  What’s happened at some sites, because they’re a little disconnected from the water table, the native plants don’t regenerate passively.  So what we’re doing today is planting some cottonwoods, willows, and some birch. We’re taking advantage of the shift in the creek to try to establish some native trees because cottonwood and willow require wet soil to germinate. We’re giving them a head start by doing what’s called a long stem planting. So we’re digging down about four feet and then we’re planting the root ball about four feet down so that the root ball should stay wet and never need to get watered again.  Then even if the creek moves back to its old channel, those trees should still survive and we’ll have increased the canopy here. 

Science Moab: we’re standing here along Pack Creek, downstream from Cinema Court behind Bonita, basically residential all around here, yet it feels very remote.  What other stretches of pack and or mill have you done this process in? 

Dohrenwend: So we’ve actually done more along Mill Creek. Our first acre was at First West and First South near the Zax parking lot. We also did another acre behind the high school, just downstream of 4th East  in the late 90s. We’ve worked on about 150 acres, maybe 200 acres now, with about 80 landowners. So Mill Creek through town, a parkway everybody uses for transportation, was a thicket of Russian olive 25 years ago. It started out with the city putting in the pathway to help with some flood control issues, but it still was a tunnel in that. So we’ve been working on Mill Creek through town, and now we’re starting to work on Pack Creek. We have worked with Forestry Fire and State Lands and the Fire Department.

There’s a number of properties up Pack Creek that we’ve worked on, and part of the idea that we learned on Mill Creek, and this is backed up by various studies about how to remove invasive species in a way that favors passive regeneration as much as possible of native plants, but we’ve removed it intentionally in a patchwork way.  So instead of starting at the headwaters and moving downstream or starting at the bottom and moving upstream, we do small patches, a few acres here and there, and then we give those a time to recover with native plants before we move on to the next. 

Science Moab: Just a few days ago, you got to see a few floods in the area.  How often do you go back to your patches and see how they fare through the flood? 

Dohrenwend: So, the last three years have been fascinating because we’ve had so many more extreme flows. when you look back at the historic record of flood flows through the valley, the last time we had a spate of roughly 5,000 CFS flows through this valley was in the 60s, maybe. When you get a flow that big. It’s almost impossible to have a riparian corridor flood quarter big enough for it, especially as the town has grown. Being on an alluvial fan, what probably happened in the past when Mill Creek would flash like that is the flow probably spread out and sometimes and from what I’ve read through some of the old historic records about Moab, Mill Creek sometimes exited the valley where it is now down near King Creek Drive, but it also would exit the valley up by where Grand Old Ranch House is.  It would move, which makes sense if you think about how an alluvial fan works. So that’s part of the challenge that we have as a community built on an alluvial fan. The creek wants to move. It’s carrying sediment. It’s building up and cutting down. How do we manage that?