BY LISA WINTERS
Back in 2003, Susie and Rick Knezevich were searching for a refuge of peace and solitude away from their busy lives. They were particularly interested in finding someplace warmer than their home in the snowy mountains of Colorado. But instead of settling on a tropical beach location, they stumbled upon Johnson Lakes Canyon, 800 acres of well-worn desert in southeastern Utah.
Drawn to the red sandstone cliffs, narrow winding canyons, and cerulean waters, they viewed the property as “paradise found” and decided to take a chance. As an interior designer, Susie saw past the severely eroded stream channel, expanses of cheatgrass, and overgrazed canyon bottom. There was a perennial spring flowing from one end of the property, spilling into a series of wetlands packed full of cattails and bullrush, and eventually into a 10-acre lake.
MARRA CLAY
And there were side canyons, snaking from the stream bottom to the cliffs and mesa-tops, concealing old middens — small mountains of fossilized plant materials collected by packrats that can date back millennia — and piles of tiny femurs, skulls, and teeth of small mammals and fish vertebrae left behind by owls.
JONATHAN BARTH
Although extraordinarily beautiful, there was trouble in paradise. Johnson Lakes Canyon is private land. Since 1996 it has been completely surrounded by Grand Staircase- Escalante National Monument, which is grazed across more than 96 percent of its desert landscape. Today, the Knezeviches don’t allow cows on their property, but that wasn’t always the case; the canyon had been grazed by goats and cattle for over a century. Weathered old corrals, a dilapidated wooden shack tucked up against a cliff wall, and an extensive span of barbed wire fences all provided signs of a time when cattle took priority.
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Even after Rick and Susie acquired Johnson Lakes Canyon, the property was being grazed by a local rancher. The rancher explained that grazing was actually beneficial to the land, so they let the cattle stay.
Unfortunately, over the next six years, Rick and Susie realized that if they wanted to leave the land better than they found it, the cattle had to go. They wanted native grasses throughout the canyon bottom and tall, native vegetation along the water’s edge, not the bull thistles and purple-hued sea of invasive cheatgrass that can survive the onslaught of cattle and trammeled stream banks. In 2009, they terminated the cattle- grazing license. Venturing out a couple times a year to remove as many of those pesky weeds as possible by hand was a tough task for Rick and Susie, who wanted to avoid using heavy machinery or herbicides. After five years of hand-weeding, they felt overwhelmed.
ELLEN MORRIS BISHOP
The future brightened dramatically in 2014, when the Knezeviches were introduced to Mary O’Brien of the Grand Canyon Trust’s Utah Forests Program. Mary was excited by the restoration efforts and the progress, and saw the potential for using Johnson Lakes Canyon as a “reference area,” where the results of removing cattle and restoring native vegetation could be compared with the results of how the federal government was managing the surrounding national monument lands. To begin documenting progress, Mary brought scientists together to conduct “bioblitzes,” cataloguing the birds, plants, and animals flourishing at Johnson Lakes Canyon.
JONATHAN BARTH
Wanting to protect the property in the future, Rick and Susie also teamed up with the Trust to place a conservation easement on the land. Making a promise to never pave roads, graze cattle, extract minerals, oil, or gas, or introduce non-native species, they essentially made a pact with the land: We’ll take care of you. Since 2015, Trust volunteers have done the same.
Last May, we arrived for a week of fieldwork, bumping along six miles of sandy road.
“Oh my gosh, remember the fields of thistle?” dedicated volunteer Mimi Trudeau said with a groan.
Spoiler alert: if you come out to Johnson Lakes Canyon once, you’re going to want to come back. In past years, we have pulled fields of invasive cheatgrass, tumbleweed, tamarisk, bull thistle, Russian olive, sticktight, and reed canary grass. We’ve installed small rock and log dams, built to slow erosion in the stream channel and raise the water table, hauled loads of sand to repair the dirt road, installed a weather station, and planted native oaks.
JONATHAN BARTH
We’ve huddled together, shivering in the rain, to trade memories of wildlife sightings on the property, such as osprey fishing in the lake, mule deer grazing in the canyon bottom, or those tracks along the road that looked an awful lot like a bobcat. We’ve jumped in the lake for a quick dip on days when the sweating starts by 9am. We’ve stayed up late into the night, entering data by headlamp from the 25 plant transects, specific locations where we are documenting every single plant species, so we can see if our restoration is working.
Stepping out of a decades-old RV, Susie greeted me in the morning with a big smile on her face and two mugs in hand, one for her, and one for Rick, who was already throwing tools into the back of the ATV. The two are relentless in their desire to make this property a refuge.
JONATHAN BARTH
Covered in dirt and sweat, on our hands and knees, dodging red-ant nests as we pulled invasive plants, we chatted. A red-tailed hawk let out its high-pitched screech right above us and we all stopped, admiring its flight. When we got back to our basecamp in the late afternoon, a few folks grabbed their binoculars and went off in search of the red-tailed hawk’s nest. Another group strolled along the dirt road, following the tracks of a wild turkey we’d spotted at sunrise. After a hearty dinner of green-chili stew (with dutch-oven peach cobbler for dessert), we all set off together to admire the sandstone walls now glowing red in the sunset, covered in tiny pockets where rare solitary sandstone bees have each dug out their own nest cavity.
Today, native cottonwoods once chewed to the ground by cattle now tower 30 feet high. Willows are thriving in dense thickets, spreading out far away from the creek, a sure sign that the water table is rising. Biological soil crusts, undisturbed places where tiny living organisms hold the soil together, giving it that characteristic blackened and bumpy look, cover entire hillsides.
JONATHAN BARTH
Great blue herons stalk fish in the lake and songbirds flit from the tall grasses, snapping up an abundance of spiders and bugs. The creek, once at the bottom of a deep ravine because heavy-footed cattle had continually sheared off the banks, is now trickling along at the surface, accessible to small wildlife and wetland plants. A field once overrun with thistle is now full of native grasses and bee flower, aptly named as it buzzes vibrantly on a late August afternoon, playing host to some of the hundreds of pollinators found in southern Utah.
JONATHAN BARTH
In 2016, 18 scientists conducted the third Johnson Lakes bioblitz. They catalogued hundreds of species in a 3-day science marathon, including peregrine falcons and sego lilies, and collected over 2,600 insects and spiders. The vibrancy of life is unmistakable.
Johnson Lakes Canyon, cattle-free for over 10 years, is a case study in what can happen when we make a commitment to care for the land. Water flows through the property like a ribbon of life, supporting a diversity of plants and wildlife. It is an oasis in the desert, and Rick and Susie are continually learning from experience.
A few extra sets of hands help, too.
Lisa Winters manages the Grand Canyon Trust’s citizen science and stewardship efforts and has been bringing volunteers to Johnson Lakes Canyon since 2016.
MARRA CLAY
BY MARY O'BRIEN
Johnson Lakes Canyon is at once a restoration site and a story of what our public lands, including the beleaguered Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, could be, once the goal shifts from commercial extraction to support for native plants and wildlife, health, and hope. With their own labor and the help of youth crews and annual Grand Canyon Trust volunteer trips, Susie and Rick Knezevich have fenced out cattle, cut Russian olive trees that choked out native plants, dragged dead sagebrush from beneath live sagebrush, seeded and planted native grasses, flowers, and trees, and weeded prickly and ambitious invasive plants.
Cottonwoods now tower above the waters and wetlands, and Gambel oak saplings are flourishing. We have 25 photopoints that are re-photographed annually to document how the landscape is changing.
But what about the grasses, shrubs, and woody plants and wildflowers (what botanists call “forbs”) that cover the canyon floor? In 2015, the Trust installed 25 transects of differing lengths — each one marked with a T-post at either end. A transect tape (similar to a tape measure) is laid down and a slender wire is pointed down at predetermined distances, and a pole set down. The species name of every plant that is physically touching the pole is recorded (by plant-savvy Trust volunteers), along with what is found at the soil level (rock, plant litter, light or dark biocrust). Three transects have a paired transect on public land that is grazed, for comparison. Species found on the site, but not touched by the transect pole, are also recorded.
The result is an annual record of what is changing beneath the trees and canyon walls, and what is not. The most consistently marvelous change is the increase at most sites in biological soil crust, which encourages water infiltration, resists cheatgrass, and prevents soil erosion. Native grasses have responded spectacularly where dead sagebrush was dragged out. Native species are almost always at least holding their own, and are increasing significantly on sites where specific invasive species have been pulled. Seeding and planting of native species are having some success, but cheatgrass, the bane of the West, is giving its best shot at claiming permanent residency. While a lot of work has gone into recording and assembling data over the last five years, the value (and number) of transects will only grow in coming years.
Johnson Lakes Canyon is a busy, hopeful landscape of both passive restoration (removing cattle) and active restoration (cutting, weeding, planting, seeding). Our national public lands could be Johnson Lakes Canyon repeated over and over, for generations.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The views expressed by Advocatecontributors are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Grand Canyon Trust.
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