Author: SanJuan Water

Zuni Bowls and One Rock Dams

An essay in appreciation of water by Robert Hagberg M.D., SJWCD Director

The near extermination of the beaver to provide city folks with hats and outfits, along with the extractive approach to the timber and grazing lands, has caused an ecological disaster in the arid West. High-level landscapes have been allowed to dry out, and wetlands have disappeared. Water, along with our atmosphere, has unimaginable amounts of potential energy that can be applied beneficially or, if poorly managed, become brutally destructive. Ranchers are only belatedly coming to understand that wetlands not only take up land that could be used for grazing but also ensure the water table is robust enough to support grasslands and pastures.

Arid highlands result in compacted soils, which provide an impenetrable surface for precipitation and melting snow. This leads to high-velocity run-offs during storms and spring thaws, causing severe erosion, incision of streams, separating them from their historic flood plains, the formation of deep gullies, and lower-altitude floods.

For the last century, we have had aerial photographs of the western landscape, many taken by Lindberg himself, that can now be compared with modern lidar-altered images to show the changes that have occurred in historic drainages. Over the last 30 years, Bill Zeedyk and his followers have been paying attention to these changes and responding with low-technology and inexpensive fixes. Zeedyk had a career with the US Forest Service studying and managing wild-lands. Upon retirement, he became interested in the vanishing wetlands in the West and started a movement to address the issues he discovered. Because of extensive private development, most of the work has been done on public lands and is just recently becoming of interest to private landowners.

Wetlands serve us in myriad ways, not the least in their ability to slow water movement during periods of heavy precipitation or rapid snow melting. Historically, the flood plain contained vegetation and structures that captured the eroding soils caught up in fast-moving water. They meandered and kept the surrounding water table at high levels. Logging operations, grazing, hiking, and even wildlife migrations provided new, compacted soils where water could run unimpeded. Being unconstrained, these high-energy flows picked up soil. They started incising the trails, causing head cuts that migrated further uphill with each new event. Dry gullies and a depletion of the surrounding landscape’s water table for acres were the result. Rapidly moving water gains momentum and energy as it continues to flow downhill. Dry landscapes are unable to absorb this flow and the result is massive flooding at lower elevations.

Zeedyk came to understand this and started a movement to reunite high altitude tributaries with their historic flood plains. He developed low technology, unskilled labor requiring fixes using locally available and, usually, free materials. He believed in the need for small tributaries and creeks to meander and, subsequently, developed the formula guiding his work that flowing bodies of water must meander twelve feet for every foot of head cut. When these waterways were reunited with their flood plains, the resulting vegetation allowed the water to do the work of restoration.

Zeedyk and his companions developed the Zuni Bowl in the Navajo lands to slow unconstrained water flows. It is a low rock structure that has a flat lower lip spillway preceded by a bowl of small rocks to provide a collection point for suspended sediments, and an entry layer that is even with the uphill grade to interrupt migration of the head cut. Below the bowl, a series of small one-rock dams can be placed to impede the remaining flowing water. That allows the sediments to precipitate out, seedlings to grow, and aquatic vegetation to establish itself. Over time, these structures will become buried, the gullies will start to fill, the water table will rise and the flood plain will be reestablished. The water will have done the work of restoration.

How long does it take? The Chama Alpine Alliance took on one badly gullied landscape below the upper and lower Canjilon Lakes in the Carson National Forest at 10,000 feet elevation. After 5 months, a 10-foot-deep gully was starting to infill, sedge grasses and skunk cabbage had become established, water was flowing in a meandering tributary, and the surrounding landscape had become spongy, absorbent ground. There was even a new small hill with a spontaneously developed spring that had carried soil from underground and deposited it at a higher elevation.

This was not the result of simply placing Zuni Bowls and one-rock dams. They used some more sophisticated techniques, building Beaver Dam-like structures with fallen logs and redirecting cattle entry points by using cobbles placed in previous undesirable access points. Ungulate hooves are incompatible with round rocky stream beds. Still, the change in the landscape was shocking. This land increased vegetation stock for all manner of grazing while providing a renewed buffer for heavy rain or snowmelt events and helping prevent lower altitude floods.

Being inspired by this work which I serendipitously discovered by registering for the wrong conference last year at the Ghost Ranch, I introduced the concept to our San Juan Water Conservancy District Board, and we soon sponsored a master’s level student to develop a project here in the San Juan Forest.

Monica Nigon, participated with other local Watershed concerned groups to show the film “Thinking like Water” that documents Zeedyk’s work and then she recruited a small group of 10 volunteers to work on a head cut in the Turkey Springs area of our local SJNF. We built a Zuni Bowl and two one rock dams over the course of a few hours on a Saturday morning. That was September 20, 2025. Only two weeks later the area was hit with a 100-year rain event that dropped 7 inches of rain on our area in only 3 days. Massive flooding ensued and I monitored our project which was less than one mile from my home. The structures not only held, but they also did their job of spreading and slowing the waterflow, capturing sediment that would have continued to silt in Lake Hatcher. It was a stunning and entirely unexpected proof of concept. Now we just need to build several thousand more of these wonderful structures.