Click the link to read the article on The Durango Herald website (Cameryn Cass). Here’s an excerpt:
December 28, 2024
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…Besides the West Fork’s beauty, it’s the largest tributary of the Lower Dolores. It’s also home to all four kinds of trout, including the only one native to Colorado, the cutthroat…
Over time, modern practices and a change of land use along the riverbanks – such as ranching, grazing, or simply cutting out big fields – has resulted in less and less “large woody debris” falling into the river, Rose said. 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.
In effect, the restoration project was in the name of something Rose called “structural complexity.”
“That’s the most important term you’ll pick up in this whole project,” Rose said. “If you don’t have complexity and have homogeneity, you don’t have the richness you need to accommodate all of the aquatic co-evolutions.”
To create this structural complexity – and put simply – the project involved strategically arranging big boulders in different ways and places along the stretch of river.