Lessons of a Stream Master

Bill Zeedyk, stream restoration master. Photo: Randy Scholfield

By Randy Scholfield 

Bill Zeedyk takes a long view of things. That might be because, at 80, he has a lot of history behind him. But it’s also due to the lessons learned from five decades of hands-on conservation work.

Restoring streams, it turns out, is not for fair-weather conservationists or the faint of heart. It takes Zen master-like patience, a keen eye for landscape, and the ability to think like a stream.

“I’ve been doing stream work for a lifetime,” Bill says, gazing out across the vast Valle Vidal (“Valley of Life”), a lush basin high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico. For years, Trout Unlimited and other partners have participated in an annual volunteer work weekend up here, part of ongoing efforts to restore Comanche Creek, a native cutthroat stronghold in the Rio Costilla watershed.

Zeedyk—a renowned small stream restoration expert—is one of the original organizers and the guiding visionary of this effort. Back in the early 1980s, when Pennzoil gifted this 100,000-acre basin to the Forest Service, Comanche Creek didn’t meet state water quality or temperature standards. Willows and native sedges had been severely grazed down by elk and cattle. Banks were eroded.

The native Rio Grande cutthroats were struggling to hold on.

Zeedyk and several groups, including New Mexico Trout Unlimited, the Albuquerque Wildlife Federation and the Quivira Coalition, began coming up here every year to tackle these problems, project by project, piece by piece.

The Quivira Coalition, a Santa Fe-based conservation group dedicated to improving ecological resilience on working landscapes, has been instrumental in pulling the stakeholders together and keeping the conservation work moving forward. 

Over the years, the coalition has worked to properly drain logging roads and prevent sediment loading, removed unneeded culverts causing erosion, and constructed exclosure fences to keep elk out and restore willows and sedges, which provide cooling shade and riparian shelter for trout.

Today, Comanche Creek exceeds all temperature and quality standards—a remarkable success—but there is much more work to be done to bring the fishery and watershed to its full potential.

Zeedyk, after decades working up here, still relishes the challenge of healing this place.

On this hot, sunny day in August, a group of volunteers, including Boy Scout Troop 189 from Albuquerque, gathers at the staging area, where shovels and other tools are handed out. We’re going to be working on Grassy Creek, a small tributary of Comanche Creek that waters this hillside meadow.

One of the scouts, Rudy Herrera, volunteered here last year and is glad to be back. “It’s always fun playing in the mud,” he says, grinning. “People are nice here, and it’s just really, really pretty. This place is massive.”

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Into the Valle Vidal. 

With his flowing beard and ever-present walking staff, Bill Zeedyk looks a bit like Moses, leading our group into the promised land. As we hike down the hillside, the basin opens below us in a grand vista of  shadow-dappled hillsides. 

Although the valley looks pristine, Bill notes that there is a long human history here. “This was a mining area,” he says. "People lived up here." A century or more ago, the valley would have been a beehive of activity—mining, grazing and logging.

To a practiced eye like Zeedyk’s, the evidence of human impact is everywhere, from invasive weeds in the pasture to faintly discernible ridges along the hillsides, created by the thousands of sheep that once grazed the slopes. He stops and points out a weathered plank of the kind once used to line the primitive frontier logging roads up here.

The miners and loggers are long gone, but ranchers still lease these lush pastures for cattle grazing.

That doesn’t bother Zeedyk. “Cattle and streams can coexist – you just have to have the goals defined and live by them,” he says. In many cases, he says, stream restoration is about range management. Up here, that means moving cattle more frequently to reduce pressure on riparian vegetation.

Over the years, Zeedyk says, his approach to stream restoration has evolved from a single-minded reliance on corrective structures to a more holistic and landscape-level approach that evolves over time.

On this day, our group is using shovels to dig out “worm ditches” or laterals from Grassy Creek, a small tributary that feeds into the Comanche below. Through human and livestock impacts, the tiny creek has been channelized over the years, cutting deeper into the hillside and rushing through instead of soaking in like a sponge to nurture the pasture and wetlands.

“What we’re trying to do is spread the water back out,” Zeedyk instructs the group.

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Bill Zeedyk shows how to dig a "worm" ditch to spread out the water. 

Last season, volunteers built a small dam here to slow the water down. This year, by digging laterals and plugging the downcuts with stone and sedges, we’ll help disperse the water to recharge the water table and bring back the more diverse grasses and sedges that once existed here.

And by better retaining the water and soil on this hillside, the small creek will have cooler, more consistent flows year-round and support better streamside habitat for the native cutthroats.

Bill gets us started digging the narrow ditches, and the water follows. Others chop sedge plugs for transplants, which we stick in the mud around the dammed water. In time, they’ll populate and restore this area to a more diverse, marshy meadow. “Sedges have the power to collect clay sediment from the water column and rebuild soil,” he points out.

We dig laterals at several other places, plug downcutting stream sections with stones, and plant sedge plugs where needed.

At some 9,000 feet, we get winded easily—or at least I do. By the end of the afternoon, our crew is pooped. I’m hot and out of water. My back aches.

Bill seems to still be going strong, as he leads our column down the mountainside to a waiting truck.

Looking back over 50 years of stream restoration, Zeedyk is gratified by several things. He’s helped restore some 280 stream segments – representing hundreds of miles of fish habitat – in New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Texas, California, and Mexico. He’s trained more than 20 experts in stream restoration, and they’re leading the next generation of stream restoration –they’ll carry on his work up here and elsewhere after he’s gone. He’s worked with thousands of volunteers over the years, and some of them have returned year after year to this place.

“I’m proud of that legacy,” Bill says, gazing out over the valley. Most of his work has focused on saving native trout in the Southwest—Rio Grande, Colorado River, and Gila species of cutthroat trout.

Why native trout? “They evolved to live in this environment and climate. They belong here.”

He marvels at their survival skills and instincts. Gila trout, for instance, “have the ability to select certain pools – somehow they know which ones won’t dry out. They’ll tolerate warmer water for a period of time, waiting for flows to return.”

It’s about persistence and tenacity over the long haul of time and place.

Bill Zeedyk’s a native here, too.

Randy Scholfield is Trout Unlimited’s director of communications for the Southwest region.