Every fall, when the aspens turn gold and the elk start bugling down in the canyons, a lot of us head out with a rifle or a fly rod and figure the mountains will always be there. Lately, though, the smoke from summer fires hangs longer, the creeks run thinner, and the deer just don’t seem as thick as they used to be. Turns out a bunch of folks in Utah decided to do something about it instead of just complaining around the campfire.
In the last fiscal year alone—July 2024 through June 2025—the Utah Watershed Restoration Initiative put boots on the ground and fixed a staggering 144,433 acres of land. That’s bigger than the entire city of Salt Lake spread out across mountains, deserts, and river bottoms from the Arizona line clear up to Idaho.
Most hunters and anglers have never heard of the Watershed Restoration Initiative, or WRI for short, but they’ve sure felt its work. Started back in 2006 by the Utah Department of Natural Resources and a long list of partners, the program tackles the stuff that really matters: clean water that stays on the hill longer, healthy sagebrush for mule deer and sage grouse, streams that hold trout, and country that won’t all burn up the next time some knucklehead flips a cigarette out a truck window.
Tyler Thompson runs the show. He put it plain: “These proactive projects to improve wildlife habitat and watershed health throughout the state are crucial, not only for our fish and wildlife species, but also for the residents of Utah. It takes a great deal of coordination and funding to make these projects possible, and we are very grateful to our many partners and their continued support of wildlife conservation and improving water quality. Along with proactive improvement projects, we also do a lot of work to restore areas impacted by wildfires, like we saw this year. These efforts are vital for maintaining healthy ecosystems.”
Numbers tell the story better than any brochure. In that single year they:
- Treated 144,433 acres total, including 13,960 acres scorched by last year’s fires
- Spread 743,787 pounds of seed from helicopters and ground rigs
- Wrapped up 120 separate projects
- Fixed or improved 142 miles of streams
- Put 539 Utahns to work doing the actual labor
All of that cost a shade over $31 million, raised from more than 63 different partners. Some of the money comes straight out of the hunting and fishing licenses you already buy—the DWR Habitat Council chips in a chunk. The rest rolls in from the BLM, Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, NRCS, conservation groups, and a pile of private outfits that just want the land to keep working.
So what does the work actually look like when you’re standing in the middle of it?
Out on the sage flats they chainsaw pj—those junk junipers and piñons that suck the water table dry—and drag them into piles so the sagebrush can come back. Sage-grouse and mule deer live or die by those big open parks of sage. They’ll even light prescribed fires on purpose, knocking back the thick stuff so a hot crown fire can’t race through later and cook everything to ash.
In the high country they’re torching small patches to bring back quakies. Elk and deer love the fresh shoots that pop up after a controlled burn, and those aspen groves soak up snow and give it back slow all summer.
Down along the creeks they’re building fake beaver dams—low rock and wood structures that do what beavers used to do before every pelt was worth a bounty. These “beaver dam analogues” slow the water, drop the silt, raise the water table, and turn a ditch into a sponge. Utah boys came up with the idea, and now places all over the West copy it.
After a fire, helicopters sling below the ridges dumping seed like it’s raining grass. This fall they’re still at it on the Monroe Canyon, France Canyon, Forsyth, Deer Creek, and Willard Peak burns, among others, trying to get something green growing before the cheatgrass takes over for good.
Since the program kicked off in 2006, they’ve treated almost three million acres through more than 2,900 projects. Drive any back road in Utah and odds are you’ve crossed ground that’s quieter, greener, and wetter because of this crew.
It’s easy to take healthy land for granted until you watch a favorite draw turn black and wash away. The men and women behind Utah’s Watershed Restoration Initiative aren’t waiting for the next disaster. They’re out there right now—chainsaws buzzing, helicopters thumping overhead, tractors planting seed—trying to keep the West the way a lot of us remember it.
Next time you fill a deer tag, catch a cutthroat out of a little creek that used to run dry by August, or just sit on a ridge watching the sun come up over country that didn’t burn this summer, tip your hat. Some of your license money, and a whole lot of hard work by people you’ll never meet, probably had something to do with it.
