Johnson Lakes Jamboree

 by Andrew Mount, Volunteer Associate

Habitat restoration at its finest

What would you do if you owned 800 acres of beautiful, cattle-free land—including a picturesque canyon complete with a lake and nesting raptors—surrounded by an equally beautiful, but heavily overgrazed, national monument? Well, if you were like conservation-minded landowners Rick and Susie Knezevich, you would place your land in a conservation easement in partnership with the Grand Canyon Trust. Then, you would undertake numerous restoration projects throughout your property in an effort to leave the land better than you found it.

This is a true labor of love, and, make no mistake, Rick and Susie love the land and are putting in tons of labor on its behalf.

An island of respite in a sea of challenges

In late May 2016, Grand Canyon Trust volunteers teamed up with Rick and Susie for a second year of restoration work, including documenting native plants and cataloging the biodiversity in Johnson Lakes Canyon. 

This private inholding near Kanab, Utah is surrounded by the nearly two million acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The monument is more than 20 years old and badly overgrazed by livestock, as over 96 percent of the land has cattle on it. 

But Johnson Lakes Canyon, in comparison, has been cattle-free for nearly a decade. This makes Johnson Lakes Canyon an extremely important reference area to compare against the monument. Here we can learn how the land responds to both active restoration (pulling weeds, planting native grasses) and passive restoration (simply removing the pressure of relentless cattle grazing). The data will be very important to show land managers, so they can see the benefits of removing cattle from the landscape and help get better grazing plans enacted.

It’s a work in progress. Sometimes, results happen spontaneously—removing cattle alone has allowed the cottonwoods and willows to come back along the creek, and today, some of the trees that were tiny sprouts when the cattle went away are over 30 feet tall. Other times, the results are more elusive. For over a decade, Rick and Susie have visited this place several times a year to pull weeds by hand. The invasive thistles are nearly gone, while the cheatgrass and tumble mustard are more tenacious. For the past two years, Grand Canyon Trust volunteers have visited the land to help Rick and Susie get closer to realizing their vision—to begin the process of returning nature to a place where it belongs.

Taking it to the next level

So what did we accomplish this year? For starters, 29 volunteers contributed over 800 hours of work to the project—no small feat! What did those volunteers do? 

We spent the first three days on a “bio blitz.” Fifteen accomplished entomologists, botanists, climate scientists, and biologists scoured the 800 acres of the Johnson Lakes property to document what lives where. 

The bio blitz yielded hundreds of photos of plant and animal species, extensive data on insects, locations and descriptions of 168 plant species, detailed information on local bird species and notes on their nesting capabilities, estimates of what should or could be here in the future with restored habitat, and a climate history of the area. We are looking for mammologists and herpetologists to visit the area soon.

And…

Over the four days following the bio blitz, 14 additional volunteers arrived to do more hands-on restoration work. They removed watercress from the main spring to allow visitor access, installed check dams to slow erosion below the spring, covered 625 square feet of reed canary grass with shade cloth to prevent its spread in a wet meadow, clipped reed canary grass along the meadow to prevent it from seeding, removed over 100 large bags of invasive mustard from the property, pulled 600 square feet of dead sagebrush, experimentally removed a sea of sticktight (Lappula occidentalis) to uncover dozens of native grass clumps, re-read 17 plant transects in various restoration sites, and removed 13 patches of invasive tamarisk from the creekside. 

One volunteer even saved a silver-haired bat and took it to a rehabilitation specialist!

Whew!

Looking ahead

We will return to Johnson Lakes Canyon to continue our volunteer efforts there alongside Rick and Susie. They will also be hosting larger conservation crews this year and beyond to tackle larger jobs, like Russian olive removal. 

We are looking forward to great data that our bio blitz volunteer scientists helped collect, and we will compile a report to guide future work and share with the public. We will also share our findings with the Bureau of Land Management as they develop the first-ever grazing plan for the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The data will allow us to show what ungrazed land can (and does) look like compared to overgrazed land. 


We couldn’t have done all of this without our wonderful volunteers: Mimi Trudeau (who stayed all 9 days!), Jim Grajek, Cliff Evans, John Godbey, Mary Townsend, Skip Mitas, Al Kisner, Barbara Phillips, Gisela Kluwin, Winnie Taney, Marti Bauer, Bob O'Brien, Bettyann Kolner, Wynne Geikenjoyner, Dennis Bramble, Kathleen Munthe, Lynn Bohs, Irene Terry, Robert Roemer, Andrey Zharkikh, Tom Kursar, Phyllis Coley, Lora and Jim Gale, Carolyn and Jim Shelton, Nancy Matteson, Jonathan Barth (who stayed over two days longer than planned!), and Tim Graham. Special thanks to Maggie Baker, Montana Johnson, Mary O’Brien, Melissa Leair, Carol Swettman, and of course, Rick and Susie Knezevich. We’re grateful to each and every one of you!

To learn more about Johnson Lakes Canyon, watch this short video by former intern Marra Clay ›