Eric Head stopped along the banks of Little Turkey Creek in southwestern New Mexico to point to a pool with a log in it that formed naturally after the Whitewater-Baldy Fire of 2012 led to massive runoff that brought debris and sediment flowing down the stream.

Over the past few years, The Gila/Rio Grande Chapter of Trout Unlimited and other organizations including Mesilla Valley Flyfishers, Amigos Bravos have worked to restore Little Turkey Creek as part of a broader effort to improve habitat in the Willow Creek watershed in the Gila Wilderness that was impacted by the wildfire. Little Turkey Creek is a tributary of Willow Creek. This effort has brought dozens of volunteers to the area.

Head works with Trout Unlimited and is overseeing their efforts to restore streams like Little Turkey Creek and Willow Creek that have been impacted by fires.

He pointed out how similar the naturally-formed pool looks to the areas that his crews have restored.

“If we get it right, then nobody will notice,” Head said.

Given time, the stream would naturally form pools instead of deep channels on its own and, Head said, it would “fix itself.”

“What we’re trying to do is speed it up,” he said.

To do that, they work to slow the flow down.

The fire changed the watershed from channels with shallow, meandering sections intermixed with deep pools that slow the flow to one with fewer pools, fewer bends and more rock bars formed by sediment plugs from the fire.

Head said those rock bars create a challenge for restoration because the river wants to cut through it and create a deep channel. 

At one such location, he pointed to felled trees and rocks that the crews used to block the water from cutting through and to channel it toward an area with a lesser slope where it will flow slower. 

Garrett Hanks with Trout Unlimited said the organization and its partners will continue to do the work to ensure the restoration is successful.

“We’re not in the business of coming in, setting it and walking away,” he said.

That means coming back year after year to monitor and maintain the work that has been done.

The crews have restored about two miles of Little Turkey Creek and hope to add another half mile to that count by the end of the year.

There’s a total of four to four and a half miles of stream that Trout Unlimited hopes to restore.

The project will have broad benefits beyond just paving the way for the Gila trout to return to Little Turkey Creek.

Slowing the flow of the water will prolong the runoff, Hanks said.

That benefits downstream communities who depend upon water from the Willow Creek watershed, including Little Turkey Creek. Willow Creek flows into the Middle Fork of the Gila River.

Hanks said the project helps build wildfire resiliency. Not only is the work mitigating the impacts of a past fire, he said it will help protect against future fires.

A blessing and a curse

While the fire decimated fish habitat, it also brought an opportunity.

The native Gila trout has long faced threats from the German brown trout and the rainbow trout, which is native to waterways connected to the Pacific Ocean in the United States. These invasive trout were initially brought into the watershed to provide opportunities for anglers. But the German brown trout will feed on young Gila trout and the rainbow trout will hybridize with the Gila trout.

Those pressures have contributed to the Gila trout becoming among the rarest trout species in the United States.

The Gila trout was first listed as endangered in 1973 but, following successful efforts to save the fish, it was downlisted to threatened in 2006.

Then the fires came.

The Whitewater-Baldy Fire of 2012 wiped out five populations of Gila trout, including some in Willow Creek. Some of the fish died because of the ash that flowed into the water while others died in the mud and debris flows that followed.

It wasn’t just the Gila trout that died. The non-native trout species were also decimated.

But that brought an opportunity to restore the Gila trout in an area free of German brown trout and rainbow trout.

A fish barrier on Willow Creek will prevent invasive trout from moving up and threatening the Gila trout.

After the Whitewater-Baldy Fire swept through, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service identified Willow Creek, including its tributary Little Turkey Creek, as a potential place where Gila trout could be restored.

Since the fire, the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as well as the Gila National Forest have monitored the Gila trout in Willow Creek and have released Gila trout into Willow Creek.

Willow Creek is considered a dendritic system, which means it has a lot of branches and tributaries. That provided some resiliency and, while five populations were eliminated, Gila trout were not completely wiped out in the watershed.

A natural occurrence

Wildfire is a natural part of the Gila ecosystem and the Whitewater-Baldy Fire was an example of that natural process. Two lightning strikes started fires in May 2012 that then joined.

The Whitewater-Baldy Fire charred nearly 300,000 acres and destroyed about a dozen cabins located on private land near the wilderness area. At the time, it was the largest fire in state history and it held that title until 2022 when it was surpassed not only by the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire of northern New Mexico but also by the Black Fire, which burned different parts of the Gila Wilderness. 

Historically, large fires may have wiped out populations of Gila trout in headwaters, but the trout would have naturally moved from nearby connected streams into the impacted waterways.

However, the Gila trout populations have become increasingly fragmented and isolated.

This makes the trout population more vulnerable to fires.

Because of this, wildfire is considered one of the biggest threats to the Gila trout alongside grazing and climate change.

And climate change is contributing to larger, more severe wildfires across the western United States due to various factors including hotter temperatures and less available water due to earlier spring runoff and decreased snowpack. Additionally, the warmer air holds more moisture, which leads to more lightning. A 2014 report published in the journal Science indicates that for each degree Celsius of warming that the world experiences, lightning strikes will increase by 12 percent. And a study published last year in the journal Nature Communications found that globally lightning flashes have increased by 43 percent. This is important because lightning is the leading cause of wildfires worldwide.

The 2022 revised recovery plan for the Gila trout states that large scale, high-intensity wildfires lead to ash flows, sediment slugs and low dissolved oxygen, which in turn can cause the destruction of fish populations. Even after the fires have been extinguished, they can still cause increased sedimentation, higher water temperatures, simplified habitat and reduced insect populations for the fish to eat. 

The watershed itself becomes impaired. Water from rains and melting snow runs off faster and doesn’t seep into the ground.

That seepage is needed because it provides storage that is then slowly released back into the streams, leading to cooler, more perennial flows.

Restoration efforts

In 2017, Trout Unlimited reached out to Natural Channel Design out of Flagstaff, Arizona. They began the process of planning the restoration work in Little Turkey Creek.

The first few years of the project were primarily focused on planning the restoration.

Then, a little more than two years ago, they began work on Little Turkey Creek. Twice a year, crews head out to move rocks and boulders into the stream to slow the flow of the water and to plant willows along the banks to reduce erosion and shade the water. The willows will also provide food for the beavers, which play a key role in creating healthy riparian ecosystems. Currently, Little Turkey Creek does not have any beavers. But beavers have been seen at its confluence with Willow Creek.

Because their work is occurring within the boundaries of the Gila Wilderness, everything has to be done by hand. If rocks need to be moved, they are carried or rolled into the stream. Mules  provided by Jim Brooks with JEB Outfitters carry in the bundles of willows to plant along the banks. Then the crews use poles that they pound into the ground to create holes for the willow cuttings. A slurry is added to the hole around the cutting.

Head estimates they have planted 5,000 willows, though not all of those trees have survived due to grazing animals like elk and cattle. Still, the vast majority of the willows—about 90 percent—have survived.

The work they have done is beginning to pay off in noticeable ways. Head pointed to places where rock barriers the crews have installed have caught sediment and caused the stream to fill in a bit. This makes the water spread out over the floodplain and soak into the ground where it is stored in the subsurface and then released back into the creek.

He can see places where that is occurring.

Federal funding

But this work requires a bit of funding and restoring the watersheds in the Gila Wilderness is a multi-million dollar endeavor. This funding comes from private and public sources, including the federal Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

On a national scale, Trout Unlimited entered into a $40 million agreement with the U.S. Forest Service in 2022 funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The five-year agreement is focused on improving watersheds. Some of that funding is going to the restoration of Little Turkey Creek.

Hanks said Trout Unlimited has about $1.6 million of Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding through national and local agreements to spend in the Gila area.

The restoration in Little Turkey Creek is just one of the projects Trout Unlimited is working on in the Gila area and each of those projects takes years to develop before work even begins on the ground.

State funding and other projects

The Little Turkey Creek project also received state funding from agencies like the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish and the New Mexico Environment Department.

The Department of Game and Fish also performed restoration work in the area where Little Turkey Creek joins Willow Creek. This work is outside of the wilderness area, which means machines can be used. A sign at the Willow Creek Campground boasts that the restoration work is made possible by the Habitat Stamp Program and that the improvements were paid for through a fee that is collected from hunters and anglers.

The Willow Creek project received Habitat Stamp Program funding in November 2021 when the New Mexico Game Commission approved spending $2.5 million on about half a dozen projects to benefit fish. Willow Creek was a priority project with an estimated budget of $1 million, though the final cost of the project was around $1.3 million.

Additionally, the New Mexico Environment Department provided Trout Unlimited with $133,000 of River Stewardship Program funds for work on Little Turkey Creek. This was one of a dozen projects that received River Stewardship Program funding through a request for proposals issued in 2021.

Little Turkey Creek was not the only Gila area project to receive funding through NMED’s River Stewardship Program in 2021. Bat Conservation International received about $207,000 for work to improve riparian habitat Black Canyon Creek in the Aldo Leopold Wilderness and the Gila National Forest.

The 2023 River Stewardship Program Funding also included several projects in the Gila area. The San Francisco Soil and Water Conservation District received nearly $600,000 in River Stewardship Program funding for work on Willow Creek watershed restoration and Bat Conservation International received nearly $300,000 for riparian restoration in the Stone Creek area of the Gila National Forest.

The River Stewardship Program receives annual allocations from the state legislature and is now able to receive funding through the newly established Land of Enchantment Legacy Fund.