{"id":24201,"date":"2024-12-28T07:35:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-28T14:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/restoration-project-on-west-fork-of-dolores-river-benefits-trout-habitat-ecosystem-as-a-whole\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T04:50:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T04:50:08","slug":"restoration-project-on-west-fork-of-dolores-river-benefits-trout-habitat-ecosystem-as-a-whole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/restoration-project-on-west-fork-of-dolores-river-benefits-trout-habitat-ecosystem-as-a-whole\/","title":{"rendered":"Restoration project on West Fork of Dolores River benefits trout habitat, ecosystem as a whole"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"An
An excavator places \u201cgigantic\u201d boulders in the West Fork of the Dolores River to create trout habitat, among other things. (Courtesy of Duncan Rose)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

An area chapter of Trout Unlimited recently partnered with a landowner to restore a portion of the West Fork of the Dolores River their property borders.<\/p>\n

The property is set off a bumpy dirt road that juts off from Colorado Highway 145, north of Dolores and surrounded by National Forest land. One may ask, why need restoration?<\/p>\n

Besides the West Fork\u2019s beauty, it\u2019s the largest tributary of the Lower Dolores. It\u2019s also home to all four kinds of trout, including the only one native to Colorado, the cutthroat.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur focus starts with trout,\u201d said Dolores River Anglers<\/a> conservation chair Duncan Rose, who spearheaded the project.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut it\u2019s really about watershed health, which is also about forest health. You don\u2019t have a good watershed unless you have a good forest, and you don\u2019t have a good forest unless you have a healthy watershed,\u201d Rose said.<\/p>\n

Over time, modern practices and a change of land use along the riverbanks \u2013 such as ranching, grazing, or simply cutting out big fields \u2013 has resulted in less and less \u201clarge woody debris\u201d falling into the river, Rose said.<\/p>\n

\"A
A view of a portion of the West Fork of the Dolores River before any restoration efforts were made. (Courtesy of Duncan Rose)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

That debris is not only a source of food, it also can be something of an anchor to slow down the water flow, and to offer fish and other critters a refuge.<\/p>\n

In effect, the restoration project was in the name of something Rose called \u201cstructural complexity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the most important term you\u2019ll pick up in this whole project,\u201d Rose said. \u201cIf you don\u2019t have complexity and have homogeneity, you don\u2019t have the richness you need to accommodate all of the aquatic co-evolutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

To create this structural complexity \u2013 and put simply \u2013 the project involved strategically arranging big boulders in different ways and places along the stretch of river.<\/p>\n

The untrained eye would hardly notice, but \u201cit has tremendous impact,\u201d Rose said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAquatic habitat is built around complexity. The more complex it is, the more niches there are for the whole ecology of the stream,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cStructural complexity strongly reinforces trophic, or food chain, complexity. The two are flip sides of the same coin,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

The team brought in an excavator to place these \u201cgigantic\u201d boulders weighing upward of three tons along the edges of the river in formations that look like a \u201cJ.\u201d<\/p>\n

They\u2019re called j-hooks with vanes, and the team installed four of them.<\/p>\n

J-hooks help redirect the thalweg \u2013 the stream\u2019s center line of maximum force \u2013 to the middle of the river so it doesn\u2019t flow and crash into the banks.<\/p>\n

\"J-hooks
J-hooks and vanes redirecting the thalweg of the West Fork of the Dolores River, aftermath of a recent project with Trout Unlimited and a private landowner. (Courtesy of Duncan Rose)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

\u201cStreams naturally meander. That\u2019s a healthy stream, particularly in the flatlands,\u201d Rose said.<\/p>\n

But when it meanders, it wipes \u201cout a bank that\u2019s putting sediment into the river, which is not in and of itself a problem,\u201d according to Rose.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut there are habitations along the river in this particular area which are threatened by that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

To be sure, the j-hooks \u2013 complete with vanes to tie rocks to the bank so water can\u2019t get around it \u2013 protect the riverbanks where fish spawn and animals hunt.<\/p>\n

Additionally, it scours out a deep pool and scours out a very deep pool right inside that hook, Rose said.<\/p>\n

Although there\u2019s no real data to support just how much this type of restoration work positively impacts trout populations, anecdotally, it\u2019s a success.<\/p>\n

Rose said Trout Unlimited helped install j-hooks at another property, \u201cand practically overnight, more fish came in.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because fish will stay in habitats they feel are \u201crich.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, j-hooks and vanes aren\u2019t the only tools in the restoration toolbox, and they weren\u2019t the only things installed at the West Fork property.<\/p>\n

Trout Unlimited, which the Dolores River Anglers belong to, also put in 30 rock clusters and a rootwad.<\/p>\n

\"Another
Another view of the completed restoration project, which includes four j-hooks, vanes, rock clusters and a rootwad on the West Fork of the Dolores River. (Cameryn Cass\/The Journal)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Rock clusters are \u201cbasically doing same thing j-hook is, but on a microscale,\u201d Rose said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAny healthy stream, when you look at it, should have large boulders, medium-sized boulders, small boulders, big cobble, little cobble. And some kind of tree, particularly those that could directly fall into the streams,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

So they placed the 30 rock clusters in such a way to break up the stream\u2019s flow and to create more trout habitat with the subsequent scouring.<\/p>\n

Rose said the rootwad is \u201cexactly what it sounds like.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the root zone of a tree,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

That root zone \u201chas an awful lot of intertwined material,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a terrific refuge for very young trout because they can get into that mixture of material,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The j-hooks, vanes, rock clusters and rootwad all make up what Rose called \u201cprocess-based restoration,\u201d a relatively new approach to rehabilitating rivers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe goal is not to restore a characteristic, but to restore processes that create and maintain characteristic forms,\u201d said Rose. \u201cInstead of putting a whole lot of money into forcing it into something, let\u2019s focus the processes to get them to do the work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not only does this mode of restoration go along with \u2013 instead of fighting \u2013 natural processes, it allows streams to take care of themselves in the long run, which saves money and mitigates human intervention.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet the water do the work rather than physical, hard structures,\u201d Rose said.<\/p>\n

The whole project took three days.<\/p>\n

And now, coupled with a recent 300-acre easement<\/a> between the Montezuma Land Conservancy and a private landowner, over 5 miles of the West Fork are now protected or rehabilitated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Unlimited recently worked with a private landowner to do the work<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24202,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[44,341,28,29],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-24201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-dolores","tag-dolores-river","tag-headlines","tag-newsletter"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24201"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78438,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24201\/revisions\/78438"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24201"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=24201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}