In the fall of 2015, a smallmouth bass swam past a stone bridge in the suburbs of Pittsburgh and entered a stretch of Little Sewickley Creek that no bass had reached since the 1920s. The fish was not
In the fall of 2015, a smallmouth bass swam past a stone bridge in the suburbs of Pittsburgh and entered a stretch of Little Sewickley Creek that no bass had reached since the 1920s. The fish was not released there and was not chased into the area. It moved upstream on its own into a shallow section of the creek where an 87-year-old concrete barrier had stood just four months earlier.Little Sewick…
For decades, this desert river barely flowed, its crumbling banks losing every drop before it reached the sea. Then engineers tried something radical—throwing thousands of dead trees directly into the water.
In 2020, on a ranch near Grand Junction, Colorado, where the state line meets Utah, a work crew began driving wooden posts into the dry gravel of a creek bed. The posts were untreated pine. The fill material was dead wood collected by hand from the floodplain. The river runs 20 miles through this 76,000-acre property of canyons and desert. By the end of the decade, more than 200 such structures we…
In Arizona, crews tore down a 96-year-old dam—and then the desert river came back to life. For nearly a century, the concrete structure had blocked the waterway, strangling the ecosystem downstream and leaving a dry, barren channel where wildlife once thrived.
A camera mounted on a rusted metal pole above a dry riverbed in Arizona recorded only cracked mud, heat, and drifting sand for years. Then, on a spring morning, it captured 14 seconds of footage showing water moving through the frame. A hydrologist reviewing the footage stopped and remained silent for nearly a minute. What had appeared in the recording was something she had never seen in that loca…
Florida removed a 60-year-old dam—then two dozen freshwater springs suddenly bubbled back to life. For decades, the concrete barrier had choked the river, silently burying natural springs beneath heavy sediment.
The Florida House of Representatives voted to approve the removal of the Rodman Dam, a structure that has separated two local waterways for decades. Conservation groups argue that the environmental benefits of removing the dam for the historic communities along the St. Johns River outweigh local concerns.The dam, also known as the Kirkpatrick Dam, was built in 1968 as part of the Cross Florida Bar…