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PrintFixing Fox Creek
Ranch restoration efforts bring in a greater number of fish and birds, while spawning great human pride
Photo By Michael McCoy
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Fox Creek twists past Blaine Huntsman’s house, cutting a blue ribbon through the straw colored autumn grasses. As he stands on the creek’s banks, I notice he rarely stops smiling. Fishing is what first drew him to this part of the world, and he takes advantage of every opportunity he gets to don his waders and wet a line.
In the eight years since Blaine and his wife Nancy purchased their property, the 400-acre parcel has become something much more than their family’s home and Blaine’s favorite fishing haunt. It has also been transformed into a sterling example of how restoration efforts can go hand in hand with running a working ranch.
The Huntsmans’ efforts have returned willows to the creek’s banks, enticed endangered Yellowstone cutthroat trout back upstream, and encouraged birds like bobolinks, sandhill cranes, trumpeter swans, and long-billed curlews, a “highly imperiled global species,” to spend time there.
The Huntsmans’ ranch lies within the southern extent of the Foster’s Slough area, a regionally important wetland and the core water bird habitat for Teton Valley. Fox Creek makes a circuitous journey before getting to this piece of land located just off 600 South between Highway 33 and the Teton River. The creek shoots down Fox Creek Canyon on the west slope of the Teton Range and, after having some of its water diverted for irrigation purposes, hits rocky soil, where it percolates down to the underground aquifer.
West of Highway 33 and just upstream of the Huntsmans’ property, springs restore water to the bed of Fox Creek, and it nearly doubles in size from where it flows onto the ranch to where it leaves it. Fox Creek is one of two main tributaries of the Teton River that still shelter spawning Yellowstone cutthroat trout. What happens to Fox Creek inevitably impacts the Teton River’s fishery.
As Blaine walks along the creek’s banks, he points to a muskrat and then effortlessly moves the conversation to the creek’s sinuosity, force, and bed-form diversity, technical terms he knew nothing about before he and Nancy embarked on their restoration adventure.
“I didn’t even know what the word ‘restoration’ meant, when it was applied to the land and habitat, when we started to get involved,” Blaine says.
Despite their lack of technical expertise, when Nancy and Blaine bought the property, they both saw signs that Fox Creek needed help. One day when Nancy and her young daughter, Merodean, were floating the creek, they tried to haul their kayak out but couldn’t, because dredging had caused the banks to become unnaturally steep and too difficult to negotiate. So, they had to travel back upstream to locate a place to take out....(continued)
