I'm a veteran rock dam builder and I thought you might appreciate some extra guidance. I've successfully created dams that can rise the water in a stream by two feet for swimming. Your check dams keep falling over because you are not giving them a good foundation. First, they simply aren't thick enough. Water weighs about 8-1/2 pounds per gallon and the dams need to be able to take all that weight coming against it at speed. If you continue with building single rows of rocks, you will forever be rebuilding them. Start with your biggest rocks on the bottom. Place them in two rows on a bed of small stones or gravel to give them a good foundation. On the downstream row, build up the front of the dam with more large stones. As large of rocks that as you can manage. The face of the damn should slope towards the upstream side a bit. Both of these foundation rows should cut far into the banks on either side. As far as you want the water to collect at the sides. Placing rocks on dirt or mud on the wings will not work for long since the path of least resistance will washing the dirt away, compromising your foundation. Don't worry about any gaps for now. On top of the upstream row, place medium sized rocks, building it up to the height of the downstream wall. Continue to build layers upstream with the rocks of each successive layer being smaller than the last, When they are small enough that they can no longer stack easily, pile the rocks in a slope from the top of the last stacked row to the upstream bed. The lip of the dam at its center should always be lower than where it meets the banks. That way, overflow with occur in the center instead of washing out the banks on the sides. The slope also redirects some of the force of the water hitting it when a vertical wall would take the hit straight on. Now take gravel and pour it in any gaps in the slope as well as in gaps between layers or individual stones. From the most downstream edge to the upstream pile should be about 3 or 4 feet. So the basic idea is that medium rocks are held back by the large rocks, filling big gaps and then each step down in size fills gaps in the previous row. The gravel serves two purposes. The obvious one is that it physically blocks water. The smaller gaps between the gravel will fill with dirt or silt, causing the water to rise. You can speed it along by putting dead plant material, like leaves and grasses, where the water will collect. Once the gravel slope is eventually clogged, silt will build up and the water will flow over the top of the upstream rows. This mitigates erosion on the downstream side since the extra water will spill down through the top of the first couple rows instead of spilling over the face and carving into the bedstream, weakening the foundation. A large flat stone or bed of smaller stones at the foot of the downstream dam face can also help prevent erosion for those occasions there is more water flowing than the dam can hold. I hope this advice is helpful to you and I look forward to seeing how you progress.
Totally agree! Simply put they are too skinny and wouldn’t withstand a hard downpour. He should invest in a mini excavator for this type of work at the scale he on.
One observation. Instead of repositioning displaced check dam rocks, try leaving them as they are and add rocks to it. Once water has moved the original rocks and silted in around them, they're not going anywhere. Adding new rocks will simply fortify the dam. Whereas repositioning displaced rocks is effectively starting over...nature has told you where the rocks belong, all you have to do is observe/listen😉
Yea whole point of check dam is also slowing down water flow, not to stop it. Bcs you if you completely stop water there it would find the way around it and carve channels around dams.
I totally agree with this. It's also a better plan to put the larger rocks on the bottom to serve as a sort of foundation. If you put them on the top like you did in your quick repair at 2:40ish mark, they will just topple off the smaller rocks underneath. So use the large rocks as the foundation, and the smaller rocks behind them so the water pushes them against the foundation as it flows. It's better in the beginning to allow the water to trickle through it instead of completely plugging it, or your dams will be washed away or the banks eroded. Give it a year for the silt to creep in and the rocks to settle into place. As much as everyone wants things to be "perfect" now, you just gotta give it time. One last thing I just thought of: If you dig a pool a few feet behind where your check dams are, that will slow the water down before hitting the dam, which would help with water retention too. That can be a lot of work though, so maybe just try it with the check dams that are consistently washing out to see how it helps.
aye. Need more material, pulled in from the nearby slopes. Will heighten the damn while even out the surrounds(if only ever so slightly). Stack em nice n tight, but keep adding: Dont keep re-using. And dont be afraid to use bigger rocks/boulders on the front, while using finer material to block the small holes from the rear. Should use "2hand rocks" that interlocks on the front, and gravel/pebbles from the rear. Them applesized pebbles aint no good as foundation.
Weed fabric in front of the rock dam will stop almost all of the silt. If you could get a truck load of hay bales to stake into the gully with weed fabric in front of it will stop all of the silt. I have done this to check erosion on land management programs I have worked on to to slow erosion. The hay will eventually break down and any seeds in the hay will sprout.
I’m sitting in a wheelchair because flip flops are not stable and I broke the largest bone in my right foot. It will take three months to heal. That was inside my house, and you are out on very unstable ground. Plus, you never know when a big rattler is hiding by one of those rocks or under some foliage, so please, Shaun, WEAR THE BOOTS! Buy waterproof boots, or oil your leather ones, but you don’t want to fall or break a foot or a leg because you’re wearing sandals! Aside from that, I LOVE what you are doing! If I didn’t live in Florida or wasn’t going to be 81 years old next month and oh, yeah, legally blind, I’d come help you with your project. It is just amazing! I hope I live long enough to see it come to full fruition. How long do you anticipate that might be?
I really think he should be wearing "snake" boots any time he is walking around or doing anything out there. Sandles are for home, inside, or city life, not the wilderness with poisonous creepy crawlies, snakes, scorpions
@@TomBTerrific Humans have a pretty good grasp on what the beaver does these days, and human-made Beaver Dam Analogues are commonly used in river restoration projects where they aren't available, to good effect. Which is the case here, there simply isn't an environment beavers can live in at this point, so you gotta make do.
Shaun , can you imagine how much water you got into the ground with your little walk in sandles trapped? Making the dams was important but the " micro management dam fixing has non-micro results!. Do the beaver thing.
@@vulantrysgoldsky3116 On that note, there's a lot you can do just by digging a half-inch deep trench on contour with a shovel. Just skim off a bit, put the material on the downslope side, and observe what happens next time it rains. You don't necessarily need big earthmoving gear to start a change.
Try using cardboard behind the check-dam to prevent the bottom from leaking. a few layers should provide enough protection to keep it from leaking until the silt builds up. Better than geotextiles because eventually it's all soil.
this. Cardboard is used in a permaculture design method called sheet composting which uses cardboard in layers and it decomposes after a while harmlessly.
I'm a prepper/survivalist. I'm learning SO much from not just these videos, but the comments. Thank you Shaun for what you're doing. Keep up the good work.
I have to line a swale and build a check dam on my land in Central Texas. Our water just bulldozes through anything. Love your ideas but I think just making your existing dams wider, thicker, and deeper and using the biggest stones you can find so they are less prone to failure might lead more small rocks and sediment to fill in the gaps. It's tough though, we have a boulder the size of a fridge that's been moved by water. People have no idea how strong it can be. Amazing series man!
The problem with "deeper" that you hold more water with even more energy. It is often not easy, especially in these gullys. If you just want to slow the water down and not store it, these leaky dams are quite good at that. Keep maintaining them, build them higher over the years as silt will built up behind them and they will work.
@@MineGoldDefi unfortunately anything that stops water flowing as cement would will just redirect it washing out somewhere else, often these washes are running at flashflood pace and will destroy anything that stands in the way...everything has to bend with and slow the flow and slowly catch soils and organic matter. Its not just a case of building dams to hold water , the soil itself needs time to regenerate all the biomatter ...even swales don't work because there is too much water in once place that once it starts flowing again makes more erosion and literally rips big long holes in the ground
I was going to write the same suggestions, especially the one about making them thicker. I recall reading that Brad Lancaster writer discussing the fact that you are often better off making more check dams and keeping them short. When they fill up, then you add another short layer but just behind the first. Repeat as needed. You end with a check dam that is sloped or stepped in structure with the lowest area downstream.
Isn't this the purpose of the bathtubs at the very beginning of each wash? It prevents the sheeting that becomes the accumulating water that picks up velocity to do the erosion. A continuous staggered line along the contour of each tributary of each wash is probably the first step before building the rock dams.
Those sandals make me nervous! I call it “unforced errors”. Those are for a hotel room, pool, or home. Not for the environment you are in. Snakebite, twisted ankle, any small incident in that isolated environment can quickly turn into something MUCH larger.
To help the check dams and bank last longer They should be constructed with more of a V shape than just a straight line. That will help smoothly funnel the water away from the bank towards the center of the dam. Right now all the water hits the flat line of the dam, becomes turbulent, and pushes sideways. Any weak areas along the bank will then fail first. With a V shaped dam the bank near it will be lined with rock slowing down the water in that area which also reduces erosion. Lets say you currently have a 5 foot wide check dam, starting a foot from each end place rocks going up stream at a 20-30 degree angle from the dam to create a wing wall. Fill in any open area between the dam and wing wall with creek gravel. It will take more rock but it will help stop the water from going around the ends.
Nothing better then the sound of water in the desert. Even the roar of a flash flood is mesmerizing. I operate a Dam on the Colorado River, and have been involved in the "control" of water for 21 years. Love it.
A thought: Right now, you have small narrow channels running into the dams. Try creating a depression just before the dam. This will create a pooling area so that the water will slow down as it runs into it, thus reducing dam erosion. Basically, a large bathtub basin just before the dam.
These are called Phiri Pits But should be places further back from the check dam, next to it will cause undercutting. However I do not recommend them in a transporting gully or wash They will fill up too quickly with sediment.
Happy to see you are experiencing first hand the reason leaky weir check dams are more than a pile of rocks. The structures must be keyed into the floor of the arroyo and both bank walls. The rocks must be place in jigsaw puzzle fashion so they all lock together and create the smallest through channels possible. Silt, sand and gravel will eventfully fill in the upstream side of the dam - but the rate of fill depends on how well the original leaky weir was built. Take your time, build them the right way so they last and perform the way you want them to. 😊
Shaun really need to study how some experts do this/teach this process & reason for it. I have watched several videos of this. You are right in your advice. Shaun needs to learn how to do this the correct way.
Awesome you are/were there during a steady rain. It may have said already but don't bother shoring your check dams on the downstream side. Think like a beaver. They always shore from the upstream side. Smaller the rocks and debris the better. Let the current carry it into the gaps and crevices. Love the progress Shaun!
You need to make the dams three times as wide and double as thick to prevent bank erosion (this implies fanning out the dam over the bank of the stream). You have enough large rocks.
Came here to say this. Needs to be thicker/wider. Flowing water is heavy. Dams need to be wider to take the force of the water and hold up. Love this project!
Agreed. Especially as these start silting in and raising water level behind them, they'll need to be wider to prevent side washing. Start with fortifying the base, then build up from there, as opposed to what we see as adding rocks at the top with nothing to act as anchor/foundation.
When I look at pictures of dams from the top many are built with a curve with the "top" of the curve where the water is being held back. Would it be feasible to constructt these check dams in a similar fasion?
I am a builder on the east coast (our watershed flows into the Chesapeake Bay, the third largest estuary on the planet). In construction, most counties require using either silt fence or super silt fence for the sake of storm water management (SWM). It definitely wouldn’t hurt to get yourself some fence/fabric to help catch the sediment. We typically drive steel poles into the ground with a mini excavator and then wrap the silt fence. It would probably be extremely helpful on some of your larger check dams!
There could be water in the large stream beds (Oxford and Cottonwood Canyon), but it's flowing under the gravel. A good example is the Window Trail in the Chisos basin at Big Bend National Park. There are several spots where the stream disappears into the gravel. It only comes to the surface where there is an obstruction, or the ground is saturated.
YOU ARE PLANTING WATER..Buy a small to medium excavator, one you can get in there, you will need it forever %100, a lot of ground.....And read read read, study study study..There are a plethora of systems and strategies you can employ, like Swales. Also Berms and Hugelkultur: Build berms (raised mounds) and hugelkultur beds (raised beds filled with decaying wood and organic matter) to trap rainwater and allow it to slowly percolate into the soil. These features can also provide a microclimate for planting drought-resistant vegetation..I could write a book on it here for you, but what's the point..Also not sure about Texas but remember to follow local regulations and seek any necessary permits before constructing a check dam, as regulations may vary by location and project size.
It’s a super important step of the process to observe the land. Definitely awesome you got to be out there during this to see and better understand. It’s seems like that dry gravely soil infiltrates at a pretty high rate. Makes me wonder if there’s a spring or subsurface water you could tap with a solar well which you could use to keep animals on the property.
Make sure its directed directly into the system. Or at least : Have to make sure you want to establish a permanent watersource on the surface, and make sure you understand what it potentially could include. This is wasteland, sometimes used by smuglers. If they get a hold that theres water, then you have potentially just opend a new route for human traficking. - I think it would be a gesture, but thats just me. Either way, its a thing you kinda have to include if you want it or not
Micro plastics are the last thing you need in your soil, or heading on out to the ocean. Take a look at how a beaver builds its dams. They really know how to mix in organic material to slow down river flow.
I love these videos, keep'em coming! If Oxford Canyon is yours, you should get some tips from Bill Zeedyk & Van Clothiers' book "Let the water do the work" and start to build angled baffles to Induce Meandering into the stream. If the canyon is not on your property, you should really contact whoever owns it and do a joint effort. That's a LOT of water more or less wasted. :) Come to think of it, you should get that book regardless, it is full of knowledge that will do your project much more successful.
“Where water runs make it walk, where it walks make it crawl, where it crawls make it sit, where it sits it will soak. “ -Mollison or Lawton. Check dams are fine to slow the water but if you try to make them perfect they will always eventually wash out or cause adjacent erosion. Thanks, enjoying your process. Best of luck.
These dams are great, and you are learning a lot, especially as water is flowing to and through them. I wanted to suggest, again, that the hills that slope down on your property need to have swales so catch the water coming down them, allowing the water to soak into the hills, which should in a few years also start to drain out at the bottom of the hills. It might even make for a semi-regular stream part to all year as you transform the hills with trees, shrubs and grasses. Trees should be planted on the downslope of the swales. You will likely need to water them periodically a few times a week until enough water has absorbed into the ground and the roots have gone down deep enough to reach the water. The shade from the trees will also help to prevent a lot of evaporation leaving the ground wetter longer for the plants and grasses. Now that you've got the check dams, focus on the hillside swales. The next step might be to figure out where you can build a large pond for the excess water and overflow from the swales in the case of heavy monsoon rains. The pond could then be used to water the newly planted trees and shrubs.
Your bathtubs had lots of green where none was before they appeared. I watched them as you walked past. Ideally when building a check dam, dig a ditch 2' wide, 6" to 1' deep and a foot into the bank. Put your largest rocks in the ditch and get close fits. Take your time filling and packing them. Apply water as you fill the ditch, this will allow the bank/ditch to become more solid. Save the flat rocks and embed them into the upstream banks to prevent erosion. The middle of the dam should be at least 6" to 1' lower than the sides. I suggest acquiring a collapsible shovel. I use a US WWII army shovel with the 3' foot handle, I recommend them. Lost mine for 9 months outside while ... and when I found it, barely any rust. Great tool.
Sean, I've been researching several species of Sumac trees. I'm now convinced that they have huge potential to rapidly create micro-climates in your washes and greatly accelerate transformation of your desert wasteland. I'm primarily referring here to the larger species which in five years can reach 10 feet by by ten years reach 20 - 30 feet in both height and diameter. But there are also sumac species which grow only 2 - 6 feet tall, The smaller species would retain your soil in but would not reach heights jointly creating local canopies a under which microclimates would exist. Other than the undesirable "poison sumac" (which grows only in wetlands anyway) most species are extremely drought tolerant and spread rapidly through underground rhizomes covering large, open spaces, forming colonies - and jungle-style canopies! The large African sumac thrives in Arizona and might be the easiest to get started there. But even the species found in wet temperate climates around the world (and here New England), once established, will thrive and reproduce rapidly. The familiar red fruits will attract wildlife, including birds, which will spread the seeds. In your situation I would create a conveniently located wire-caged nursery with hundreds of seedlings -- perhaps mostly African (grows 2 feet per year, can reach 30 feet tall) and staghorn sumacs (reach 15 to 25 feet tall, but might need more care to get established in the first year or two in your desert), protect them from herbivores, water them for a few months, maybe a year, and then plant them in a half dozen or more washes, in groups of ten or more, each group clustered closely enough to quickly establish micro-micro climates utilizing each other's respiratory moisture (perhaps one square yard per seedling at first, with the option of transplanting half of them when they have begun to compete with each other. When you plant your seedlings in erosion-prone washes try staking 8' x 12' sections of chicken wire to the soil, and planting the seedlings in the wire mesh to protect them from floodwaters while they get their roots down deep enough to survive heavy rains. You might have to cut wire from around their bases after two or three years of growth so they won't be choked by the chicken wire when their trunks exceed two inches in diameter. A reply would be appreciated if you find this interesting. - JH
"Eaten as a delicacy?" I assume you mean that a spice is made from the seeds throughout the Middle East. Or are you referring to the sumac "leaves" that some people eat when they are very small and tender in the spring? I've tried them. Not great. Edible. A delicacy? Maybe there's some way to prepare them...? What am I missing about this delicacy? @@estebancorral5151
Shaun thanks for sharing. When I worked on a park in South Texas we used bags of cement to channel and hold water. It can be a bit expensive. Maybe you could use sandbags with a mixture of sand and clay as the base for your check dams? That should stop most of the water from just passing through.
Letting the water pass through is a good thing with check dams, as making a pond and keeping the water isn't the goal. You're trying to "check" the speed of the water flowing down the channel, which makes silt fall out of solution onto the creek bed and eventually build up.
In my years of playing with rock dams... a strong pebble game and mashed up dried cow patties on the upstream side, has been quite effective. I have also learned that if I want to catch sediment to play mostly outside of the main washes with the one rock dams, earthworks in the wash is extremely satisfying to watch but is a losing battle with lots of rebuilding. Although when one loses a dam, the rock deposit is generally in a prime location to build a new one that will hold and catch. I am in the high desert on open range.
Dear Shaun, thank you so much for your videos. As I've been bed-bound from Covid for 2 years now, videos like these are a way to see things outside my bedroom. I've always wanted to do something like this - adapting a (much smaller) property to changing climate and making it more robust and livable. Now I can live that a little through you. Fascinating stuff and I like your style of documenting the process!
If you like building stuff too, check out "Tokyo Llama". He and his Japanese wife bought an abandoned (stunning) house in Japan and over 4 years of hard work he's almost done. Japan was nearly closed to immigration but has suddenly looked at statistics and realized immigration is the only way to keep their country strong.
adddude- Increase d 3. walk in the sun daily for 2 hours with no shirt and walk in the forest. take d3. ester c and zinc daily. eat 90% fruits and veggies and only drink spring water. make celery juice and drink on emply stomach in the am. read books about celer y ju ice. thanks
Kind of funny spends the episode being super happy about his trickles of water coming down his baby dams. Then tries to leave and sees a rushing river going down the road.
Dude, every one of your videos is so inspiring. I’ve been watching a couple a day since discovering your channel. I watch your progress and then go out and work on my little food forest. I think you’ve motivated me to do at least twice as much work on my food forest project as I normally manage. Edit: on the topic of your Little Rock dams. If your soils have a bit of clay, you can easily reinforce the check dams by working while it’s wet and packing clay and mud into the rocks.
Nice job. I have made dams all my life and it is a tradition of my family to make them wherever we picnic. Big stones at the back and on the bottom, everything else facing the flow. You can arch it across the span for additional strength. Like a good wine, a well made dam only gets stronger with time as all the sediment and organic material clogs the gaps. Dams aerate the water as they form rapids and only provide good to an area.
You need a big slope of stone at the bottom - a buttress. Water takes the path of least resistance. So take out some stones at the top center so it takes the path where you want it to channel. Otherwise it will pool up and spill toward the banks and wash out smaller stones and particles. People need to be doing this work everywhere! Good for you.
This reminds me of some of my happiest times going down to the local brook with my brother and making a dam with rocks so that I could catch more sticklebacks and stone loaches.
I don't know if any grasses will grow there, but they are excellent in keeping soil together and preventing run-off. What would be ideal if the check-dams were planted with grass.
wow! nice. Love your channel. And as a marketer I would like to highlight that I like seeing your videos on a weekly basis. Every Sunday morning here in Dubai I enjoy your videos and it became for me as a reality show. Thank you Shaun! Consistency is a key for your channel and yeah... your content is so cool! Happy you got those rainfalls and now we all see the results of your work and how the system can be improved! Good luck!
I love watching these restoration projects, and my love to " Stop The Water" is perhaps getting to much! I have studied water in one way or another all my life and my brain was nearly exploding watching some of this and you have to know, I love what you are doing and the channel but god damn, " All the lovely water". OK, So you got yourself some lovely French Drains in places, but what you want is some stone beaver dams. Stack the largest stones at the back 60 degrees slope , to down stream and 30 degrees to the up stream, in a C shape, on a bed of small slow filtrating stones. Make that a solid structure by itself, have it lowest in the middle of/ furthest down stream point of your structure, the level you want to water to come up to and leave. NOW " Crucially " layer stones in order of size. A wall of the next size down rocks, on the up stream side, and if there a stones or rocks that will fill in the gaps between the rocks and wont wash through, do it And continue, smaller and smaller on the up stream, on 30 degrees, " A ramp for the water, Not a wall!" Take some of the bank away , on the up stream so that you have a bowl pool shape before the check dam. So the banks and flow direct to the center of the check Dam, the most reinforced part of the wall. For larger volumes of water, add feet of flat level rocks after the 30 degree ramp, before the drop of of 60ish degrees. Ha! for a skate boarder it's a flat box with a 30 degree slop to upstream wit a 60 degree down stream. If that helps 😆 In a c-ish shape. Layers of cardboard dissolving, materials, grasses, weeds in the layers of rock will help gather the materials that are washing through your Check Dams. I know a lot of work, But I am sure there are some nice spots that will pool big and perhaps deserve the extra attention. Good Luck on the endeavour! I look forward to the results of this rain fall. All of it. The settling, any greening. man if you had a shovel and just dug out the bank and put it on the upstream bank, fro the bottom up until you had a nice ramp you probably could have stopped all the water up to check dam over flow level and it would be just building and building sediment and the over flow is important.
Hi Shaun. I've been watching your journey for a while now and appreciate you showing the ups and downs. I've watched other videos where people are doing similar things and two things have caught my attention. A year or two from now when the greening starts and things start changing, you will want to show comparisons of before and after. With that in mind, have you thought of taking specific pictures of an area with the plan to reproduce the shot from the same location and angle later? Perhaps you can plant some stakes or fence posts to use as markers of specific areas. Also, that would allow people watching to recognize specific areas, because right now its hard to tell one section from another. It may also help you track how long it takes each area to change. With the bathtubs, have you considered adding a layer of compost and brush to them? This should help with water retention, and provide nutrients to the soil for anything trying to sprout. Which if possible you could plant a variety of seeds in various areas to see what will thrive with minimal investment of resources. As for compost I'm sure it would be a process moving loads out there. But perhaps if there is a local tree company they would be willing to provide you with compost which they need to dispose of, and you could bring it out in smaller loads with you. Perhaps you can mark each bathtub that you are able to do this to with stakes or marker to track which seeds you try in them. Now that you have received some good rain you can see which bathtubs are receiving water and can focus on those first. Reading through the comments, I know you receive a lot of suggestion of items to try and I imagine that time and labor to implement is a large factor in what you can to and when. I will continue watching your journey and wish you success.
@twofingeredmamma - clay is used to seal up the bottom of ponds! It's great as is and holds water extremely well. So much so that it's very hard to garden in clay soils as it stays so wet and doesn't drain. When it dries it's like concrete its so hard!
Sealing isn't what he needs to be doing here, unless he's trying to make a pond. You want water to be able to leak through and over the dam, just slowed down enough that material will drop out and deposit as silt. The trick here is to have many of these leaky dams slowing things down all along the way.
May I suggest that you put the smaller rocks on the UPHILL side of the dam? By putting them on the downside, water pressure will build up and push them away. if they are on the upside, then they are seate in place better,
I am over 60 now and I live in The Netherlands but as a young child I used to play with my friends when we lived in Surinam we always played in the rain making channels and dams in our garden, my mom wasn’t to happy about it of course 😁
Have you thought about using rabbit wire as a cheap way to contain the rocks within the gabion? This could keep them from falling apart, and saves lots of time rebuilding after every rain event.
I accidentily invented a Hydraulic Dam maker when I was 12. I built a solid low dam 18 inches deep, across a little creek, and for laughs, put a 2 inch pipe about 6 inches below the top. It made a lovely little fountain, of course. I'm now 50 years older. The dam is still intact, but there is a pond 6 feet deep by 15 feet across on the bottom side of the dam, after years of fountain digging. It occurred to me that this might work to develop ponds in your water courses. Just a thought.
To protect the banks from eroding you can either dig out and set rocks in the banks (high labor input) or line the river bed walls upstream of check dam, higher than your spillway. Also suggest lining the spillway from your road with rocks to stop erosion. Hope you can add a retention pond one day.👍
Do you think that earthbags used as the core for your check dams might help with reducing the leaks? Also have you considered using the billboard tarps as a water catchment for your camp and for building purposes?
If you plan on building more check-dams, try using 10lb bags of sawdust and some compost from your kitchen to create a slurry. The slurry should help plug some of the holes within and also help in creating the required organic matter that would grant better stability to the microenvironment.
Cardboard YES! I work in a Hardware/Feed store. All of the feed comes in on pallets. Each pallet's flat base has a 40 x 48 " piece of cardboard on the bottom before the feed is stacked on the pallet. We get 100's of pallets each month and always have a stack of carboard. I use it at home on the ground to keep the weeds and lots of other projects. THE BEST PART IS "ITS FREE"!!!!!!! So go find a feed store and ask them for cardboard from the pallets. Sure they will be HAPPY to give it to you. It breaks down and creates soil....
If you can find a local source of clay you can use that to secure your check dam’s like they do when building ponds. Once it hardens it holds water perfectly. Great job!
@@guillermodelnoche Shaun needs to learn more about how to correctly build check dams & their purpose. He needs to slow down the water & reduce the flow force to allow silt to naturally fill in the gaps between the stones. The goal is to keeps the water longer on the ground to allow it to soak into the ground instead of just flowing by. He is trying to hydrate the ground to allow plants to grow. It is a process that takes time. Patience is needed.
@@lorettarussell3235 I’m completely aware of how this works. I have successfully rerouted water into my water tables using stone stack check dams. I used red clay from 10 miles away to make a bowl shape that held the water against the dam, didn’t erode the sides of my wash and I have an extreme amount of flowers and grass due to it in two years. I’m telling him that clay is a great natural resource to hold the water at a location and allow the excess to overflow not damaging the dam. I have done this successfully. I appreciate you explaining what he is doing but I assure you it works in actuality.
When ever tightening a dam, you hold more water. More water has more potential to destroy your dam. Shaun is doing great in also strengthening the banks and widening it. You want a slow and steady flow over as wide as you can get it. That's why they build weirs often in a zig zag pattern.
*Should* he be plugging the dams up? The idea here is to slow the water, not make a deep pond (which might be an option further down the line). Better to add more rocks on the downstream side to thicken the dam and slow the water that much more and add stability.
I work on a desert ranch in the Big Bend region and we have dams to collect water for the local fauna and livestock.. The biggest problem you have with all of the check dams is they are WAY TO SMALL. You need to at minimum triple the thickness and double the height for each dam. Additionally as your building the dams add a couple of shovels of the dirt between the rocks for the bottom 1/3 to 1/2 of the dam. The top third should just be larger rocks, that are big and heavy enough to not get washed away but with enough gaps to allow overflow water to flow though and not top or wash the sides away of the dirt on the dam sides. Hope that helps.
I'm no expert, but I think it might slow down the water even more if it didn't go in such a narrow and steep canal at the bottom of the canyon. Using cut and fill, I would experiment with making the stretch between a few checkdams more flat/in level. So, dig out material just beneath a checkdam and dump it on the next checkdam. Also, encourage it to meander from side to side in an s-pattern between two checkdams, so the water has a longer time to travel and less energy/speed to carry the sediments away. I don't know, but it might be worth experimenting with. Maybe I would try to dig a small pool beneath a few checkdams, to mimic the natural waterfall pools you see where the kinetic energy from the stream is dissipated before the water gently flows further downstream. Then you can test the soil after the rains to see if now sediment accumulated and it retained more moisture. You are a true inspiration and I really enjoy following your posts! Thanks for the video.
You’re forgetting some important steps regarding the beaver. First I know of No Beaver damns built in dry river beds. I could go on but whats the point…
You have stuff growing in your bathtubs! 😍😍😍😍 I’m loving watching the iterative process of you learning and improving each check damn as you do it. We just watched you level up your check damn game in real time 🥰 well done 😁😁😁
2:45 Likely the water eroded the soil around it. It's what happens when you don't slow down the water enough, if you allow the water to freefall from the far end of the barrier it gets all the momentum back it need to come down with a gradual slope that way you have friciton all the way.
Have you checked with the county to see if there are limits to the amount of dirt that can be moved without a permit? I'd like to see you build a large dam and pond using old wood, brush, chainlink and rocks covered with dirt.
Fill the back side of the dam, the water collection area, with organic material. That will slow the water enough to allow it to seep in rather than flow by.
You should set up some cameras to watch those dams of yours. You'd be amazed how little water it takes to upset a man-made structure, especially one that's so haphazardly slapped together. Might also want to read up on how beavers go about doing this. They use progressively smaller material kind of like the roof on an adobe. I do admire and commend these efforts regardless of how they have been implemented.
Hope this reaches you because I was watching your video just wishing I could assist and get my own hands dirty. I like watching your thought process and think you’d be a cool dude to work with on something like this. I think overall you have a good grasp of where the rain is funneling to and going however something’s i have done my self and experienced is that the rain will continue to penetrate through the dams unless you you use a variety of sized rocks down to sand. Fabrics or weed mats may work but I’ve personally seen a variety use of materials while construction like sand and small rocks and big rocks all intertwined the dams would be retaining a lot more water. Let me know if that helps. Love to hear more about it!
Besides of the hints of all the other helpful posters, I want to recommend including dried gras and woodsticks IN the center of your dams - from ground up. The more, the better. This is important to give the smallest pieces of gravel a chance to get stuck IN the dam. You'll see, it's easy to do and has great affect to the dam. Keep on doing your amazing work - I wish you good luck to get the desert green! :)
Ideally you position hay bails in front of the rocks in all the contour runs, they could also be much longer, connecting setting (bath) to setting using the setting spill ways…..
In the bottom of the little wash out if you dig deeper you might find clay you can use to seal your little check dams. I could be too late for the party though.
Love seeing this, the natural flow and how the check dams work, and where they aren't working, awesome to catch this as rain is falling, can truly see what's needed and why. this is just awesome! I'm trying to watch all channel content from the beginning, want to see the progress and changes as occur. Great content!!
Source your rocks from outside the riparian zone. Build a check dam with T-posts, wire fencing, and rocks. Use whole haybales and also spread them in the wash upstream of the dam. Whole haybales can be T posted right into the ground. Prune deadwood off of any of the shrubs outside the riparian zone. Did this method with the forest service in OR 30 yrs ago on a 15 mile stretch of river that yielded enough gold in the 1880s that everyone moved in, cut all the trees and made log cabins and hydro-mined for about 10 yrs B4 they all left. Cattle ranchers stayed and the river dried up.
I'd be interested to know how you got the rocks to the location if your bringing them in. Aside from the dam in the road, it's extremely difficult to get anything around there. That's also where we threw the track on the mini ex. It's rough terrain
Haybales can stay moist for weeks after a thorough soaking. Can you get haybales in there with your rocks on top and all around? Detritus in the riparian zone is the most important factor. The water itself will fill all of the cracks and holes in the dam if you add organic material upstream.
@@dustupstexas can you get haybales in on a quad or something? Haybales really work way better than anything else. Not that we didn't use rocks but they wanted organic matter first and foremost.
It's encouraging that the water is slowing down enough to pool. I suspect some of the impoundments need to be much larger. Woodfalls and cardboard could be helpful. Also desert grass seed mix may be a good thing to buy and keep in stock as well.
One thing I might try is digging out 2 or 3 small ponds at your check dams. Make the banks 2 or 3 feet wide using the dirt and rocks dug out from the ponds. This can all be done by hand and you don’t need heavy equipment just a few hours of digging. Then force the flow to go to the side before it goes to the next pond. If you can slow it to the point of swirling then a lot will be able to soak into the ground. Your areas where the water is spreading and swirling around the bushes look best in my opinion. Also when you’re building up your dam you should have a shovel with you to take sediment out of the pool from the upstream side to pile on the dam rather than the downstream. Otherwise you’re just creating waterfalls. Which is fine if there’s a bid pool to catch water but not really helpful to prevent erosion. Also you might consider putting in some willow stakes now if you’re going to a wetter season. Keep up the great work. 320 acres is a huge project. I have 10 acres and I’m constantly working on it. I can’t even imagine the scale on 320. Honestly your project is hugely inspiring!
I would also get a small tractor and start pushing the rocks to the road and slowly build roads. Buy a used tractor and rent it out to locals when not using it to pay for it. In a year you will have great rock roads. Keep up the good work !!
I'm a veteran rock dam builder and I thought you might appreciate some extra guidance. I've successfully created dams that can rise the water in a stream by two feet for swimming.
Your check dams keep falling over because you are not giving them a good foundation. First, they simply aren't thick enough. Water weighs about 8-1/2 pounds per gallon and the dams need to be able to take all that weight coming against it at speed. If you continue with building single rows of rocks, you will forever be rebuilding them.
Start with your biggest rocks on the bottom. Place them in two rows on a bed of small stones or gravel to give them a good foundation. On the downstream row, build up the front of the dam with more large stones. As large of rocks that as you can manage. The face of the damn should slope towards the upstream side a bit. Both of these foundation rows should cut far into the banks on either side. As far as you want the water to collect at the sides. Placing rocks on dirt or mud on the wings will not work for long since the path of least resistance will washing the dirt away, compromising your foundation. Don't worry about any gaps for now.
On top of the upstream row, place medium sized rocks, building it up to the height of the downstream wall. Continue to build layers upstream with the rocks of each successive layer being smaller than the last, When they are small enough that they can no longer stack easily, pile the rocks in a slope from the top of the last stacked row to the upstream bed.
The lip of the dam at its center should always be lower than where it meets the banks. That way, overflow with occur in the center instead of washing out the banks on the sides. The slope also redirects some of the force of the water hitting it when a vertical wall would take the hit straight on.
Now take gravel and pour it in any gaps in the slope as well as in gaps between layers or individual stones. From the most downstream edge to the upstream pile should be about 3 or 4 feet. So the basic idea is that medium rocks are held back by the large rocks, filling big gaps and then each step down in size fills gaps in the previous row.
The gravel serves two purposes. The obvious one is that it physically blocks water. The smaller gaps between the gravel will fill with dirt or silt, causing the water to rise. You can speed it along by putting dead plant material, like leaves and grasses, where the water will collect. Once the gravel slope is eventually clogged, silt will build up and the water will flow over the top of the upstream rows. This mitigates erosion on the downstream side since the extra water will spill down through the top of the first couple rows instead of spilling over the face and carving into the bedstream, weakening the foundation. A large flat stone or bed of smaller stones at the foot of the downstream dam face can also help prevent erosion for those occasions there is more water flowing than the dam can hold.
I hope this advice is helpful to you and I look forward to seeing how you progress.
Great advice.
this is amazingly informative, clear, and thorough!
This guy know what hes talking about
Totally agree! Simply put they are too skinny and wouldn’t withstand a hard downpour. He should invest in a mini excavator for this type of work at the scale he on.
Great advice.
One observation. Instead of repositioning displaced check dam rocks, try leaving them as they are and add rocks to it. Once water has moved the original rocks and silted in around them, they're not going anywhere. Adding new rocks will simply fortify the dam. Whereas repositioning displaced rocks is effectively starting over...nature has told you where the rocks belong, all you have to do is observe/listen😉
Yea whole point of check dam is also slowing down water flow, not to stop it. Bcs you if you completely stop water there it would find the way around it and carve channels around dams.
I totally agree with this. It's also a better plan to put the larger rocks on the bottom to serve as a sort of foundation. If you put them on the top like you did in your quick repair at 2:40ish mark, they will just topple off the smaller rocks underneath. So use the large rocks as the foundation, and the smaller rocks behind them so the water pushes them against the foundation as it flows. It's better in the beginning to allow the water to trickle through it instead of completely plugging it, or your dams will be washed away or the banks eroded. Give it a year for the silt to creep in and the rocks to settle into place. As much as everyone wants things to be "perfect" now, you just gotta give it time. One last thing I just thought of: If you dig a pool a few feet behind where your check dams are, that will slow the water down before hitting the dam, which would help with water retention too. That can be a lot of work though, so maybe just try it with the check dams that are consistently washing out to see how it helps.
aye. Need more material, pulled in from the nearby slopes. Will heighten the damn while even out the surrounds(if only ever so slightly).
Stack em nice n tight, but keep adding: Dont keep re-using.
And dont be afraid to use bigger rocks/boulders on the front, while using finer material to block the small holes from the rear. Should use "2hand rocks" that interlocks on the front, and gravel/pebbles from the rear.
Them applesized pebbles aint no good as foundation.
Yes and add smaller rock to fill the gaps
Weed fabric in front of the rock dam will stop almost all of the silt.
If you could get a truck load of hay bales to stake into the gully with weed fabric in front of it will stop all of the silt.
I have done this to check erosion on land management programs I have worked on to to slow erosion. The hay will eventually break down and any seeds in the hay will sprout.
The sound of trickling water is the most beautiful natural sound.
The Fremen believe that heaven is the sound of flowing water.
I’m sitting in a wheelchair because flip flops are not stable and I broke the largest bone in my right foot. It will take three months to heal. That was inside my house, and you are out on very unstable ground. Plus, you never know when a big rattler is hiding by one of those rocks or under some foliage, so please, Shaun, WEAR THE BOOTS! Buy waterproof boots, or oil your leather ones, but you don’t want to fall or break a foot or a leg because you’re wearing sandals! Aside from that, I LOVE what you are doing! If I didn’t live in Florida or wasn’t going to be 81 years old next month and oh, yeah, legally blind, I’d come help you with your project. It is just amazing! I hope I live long enough to see it come to full fruition. How long do you anticipate that might be?
I really think he should be wearing "snake" boots any time he is walking around or doing anything out there. Sandles are for home, inside, or city life, not the wilderness with poisonous creepy crawlies, snakes, scorpions
Not to mention the danger of stepping on a pop top😮
Be the beaver Shaun. Be the beaver.
Hahaha a beaver has instinct and experience going for it!
@@TomBTerrific Humans have a pretty good grasp on what the beaver does these days, and human-made Beaver Dam Analogues are commonly used in river restoration projects where they aren't available, to good effect. Which is the case here, there simply isn't an environment beavers can live in at this point, so you gotta make do.
Shaun , can you imagine how much water you got into the ground with your little walk in sandles trapped? Making the dams was important but the " micro management dam fixing has non-micro results!. Do the beaver thing.
@@vulantrysgoldsky3116 On that note, there's a lot you can do just by digging a half-inch deep trench on contour with a shovel. Just skim off a bit, put the material on the downslope side, and observe what happens next time it rains. You don't necessarily need big earthmoving gear to start a change.
Import some bevers from the Utah desert
Try using cardboard behind the check-dam to prevent the bottom from leaking. a few layers should provide enough protection to keep it from leaking until the silt builds up. Better than geotextiles because eventually it's all soil.
this. Cardboard is used in a permaculture design method called sheet composting which uses cardboard in layers and it decomposes after a while harmlessly.
Cardboard will also degrade right into the soil. In Michigan, I use it as a weed barrier in my flower beds and eventually have to replace it.
@@zombi3907 And worms love cardboard! You need earthworms to provide castings for plant nutrition! They build fabulous soil.
I would also put the large rocks on bottom.
Some cardboard types have plastic in them from what I've heard in the composting community.
Congratulations on dust ups being replaced by rain ups for a episode. Good to see your joy.
😀
Shaun, you totally ignore a weather report and go into the desert. Do that often and you will be a feast for the vultures
I'm a prepper/survivalist. I'm learning SO much from not just these videos, but the comments. Thank you Shaun for what you're doing. Keep up the good work.
I have to line a swale and build a check dam on my land in Central Texas. Our water just bulldozes through anything. Love your ideas but I think just making your existing dams wider, thicker, and deeper and using the biggest stones you can find so they are less prone to failure might lead more small rocks and sediment to fill in the gaps. It's tough though, we have a boulder the size of a fridge that's been moved by water. People have no idea how strong it can be. Amazing series man!
The problem with "deeper" that you hold more water with even more energy. It is often not easy, especially in these gullys. If you just want to slow the water down and not store it, these leaky dams are quite good at that. Keep maintaining them, build them higher over the years as silt will built up behind them and they will work.
Cement
@@MineGoldDefi unfortunately anything that stops water flowing as cement would will just redirect it washing out somewhere else, often these washes are running at flashflood pace and will destroy anything that stands in the way...everything has to bend with and slow the flow and slowly catch soils and organic matter. Its not just a case of building dams to hold water , the soil itself needs time to regenerate all the biomatter ...even swales don't work because there is too much water in once place that once it starts flowing again makes more erosion and literally rips big long holes in the ground
I was going to write the same suggestions, especially the one about making them thicker. I recall reading that Brad Lancaster writer discussing the fact that you are often better off making more check dams and keeping them short. When they fill up, then you add another short layer but just behind the first. Repeat as needed. You end with a check dam that is sloped or stepped in structure with the lowest area downstream.
Isn't this the purpose of the bathtubs at the very beginning of each wash? It prevents the sheeting that becomes the accumulating water that picks up velocity to do the erosion.
A continuous staggered line along the contour of each tributary of each wash is probably the first step before building the rock dams.
Those sandals make me nervous! I call it “unforced errors”. Those are for a hotel room, pool, or home. Not for the environment you are in. Snakebite, twisted ankle, any small incident in that isolated environment can quickly turn into something MUCH larger.
To help the check dams and bank last longer They should be constructed with more of a V shape than just a straight line. That will help smoothly funnel the water away from the bank towards the center of the dam. Right now all the water hits the flat line of the dam, becomes turbulent, and pushes sideways. Any weak areas along the bank will then fail first. With a V shaped dam the bank near it will be lined with rock slowing down the water in that area which also reduces erosion. Lets say you currently have a 5 foot wide check dam, starting a foot from each end place rocks going up stream at a 20-30 degree angle from the dam to create a wing wall. Fill in any open area between the dam and wing wall with creek gravel. It will take more rock but it will help stop the water from going around the ends.
Leonardo da Vinci discovered that and incorporated it into his canal lock design.
❤
Nothing better then the sound of water in the desert. Even the roar of a flash flood is mesmerizing.
I operate a Dam on the Colorado River, and have been involved in the "control" of water for 21 years. Love it.
A thought: Right now, you have small narrow channels running into the dams. Try creating a depression just before the dam. This will create a pooling area so that the water will slow down as it runs into it, thus reducing dam erosion. Basically, a large bathtub basin just before the dam.
Need to reinforce the bottom if you do this, or it will undercut your dam.
@@ethandoingstuff1433 Even is the bathtub basin is three feet from thd damn?
These are called Phiri Pits But should be places further back from the check dam, next to it will cause undercutting. However I do not recommend them in a transporting gully or wash They will fill up too quickly with sediment.
Happy to see you are experiencing first hand the reason leaky weir check dams are more than a pile of rocks. The structures must be keyed into the floor of the arroyo and both bank walls. The rocks must be place in jigsaw puzzle fashion so they all lock together and create the smallest through channels possible. Silt, sand and gravel will eventfully fill in the upstream side of the dam - but the rate of fill depends on how well the original leaky weir was built. Take your time, build them the right way so they last and perform the way you want them to. 😊
Shaun really need to study how some experts do this/teach this process & reason for it. I have watched several videos of this.
You are right in your advice. Shaun needs to learn how to do this the correct way.
Awesome you are/were there during a steady rain. It may have said already but don't bother shoring your check dams on the downstream side. Think like a beaver. They always shore from the upstream side. Smaller the rocks and debris the better. Let the current carry it into the gaps and crevices. Love the progress Shaun!
I'm glad that you went during a rainy time to see the flow of water on your property !
You need to make the dams three times as wide and double as thick to prevent bank erosion (this implies fanning out the dam over the bank of the stream). You have enough large rocks.
true and he has plenty of rock !!
Came here to say this. Needs to be thicker/wider. Flowing water is heavy. Dams need to be wider to take the force of the water and hold up. Love this project!
Agreed. Especially as these start silting in and raising water level behind them, they'll need to be wider to prevent side washing. Start with fortifying the base, then build up from there, as opposed to what we see as adding rocks at the top with nothing to act as anchor/foundation.
And have the center lower than the banks so the water doesn't flow high enough to wash out the banks
When I look at pictures of dams from the top many are built with a curve with the "top" of the curve where the water is being held back. Would it be feasible to constructt these check dams in a similar fasion?
I am a builder on the east coast (our watershed flows into the Chesapeake Bay, the third largest estuary on the planet). In construction, most counties require using either silt fence or super silt fence for the sake of storm water management (SWM). It definitely wouldn’t hurt to get yourself some fence/fabric to help catch the sediment. We typically drive steel poles into the ground with a mini excavator and then wrap the silt fence. It would probably be extremely helpful on some of your larger check dams!
There could be water in the large stream beds (Oxford and Cottonwood Canyon), but it's flowing under the gravel. A good example is the Window Trail in the Chisos basin at Big Bend National Park. There are several spots where the stream disappears into the gravel. It only comes to the surface where there is an obstruction, or the ground is saturated.
Remember, you are trying to slow, spread and sink the water....not trying to stop it or erode the banks 😅
YOU ARE PLANTING WATER..Buy a small to medium excavator, one you can get in there, you will need it forever %100, a lot of ground.....And read read read, study study study..There are a plethora of systems and strategies you can employ, like Swales. Also Berms and Hugelkultur: Build berms (raised mounds) and hugelkultur beds (raised beds filled with decaying wood and organic matter) to trap rainwater and allow it to slowly percolate into the soil. These features can also provide a microclimate for planting drought-resistant vegetation..I could write a book on it here for you, but what's the point..Also not sure about Texas but remember to follow local regulations and seek any necessary permits before constructing a check dam, as regulations may vary by location and project size.
He needs to learn how to use an excavator, buy one and start building swales..More than this approach..
It’s a super important step of the process to observe the land. Definitely awesome you got to be out there during this to see and better understand. It’s seems like that dry gravely soil infiltrates at a pretty high rate. Makes me wonder if there’s a spring or subsurface water you could tap with a solar well which you could use to keep animals on the property.
Make sure its directed directly into the system. Or at least : Have to make sure you want to establish a permanent watersource on the surface, and make sure you understand what it potentially could include.
This is wasteland, sometimes used by smuglers. If they get a hold that theres water, then you have potentially just opend a new route for human traficking. -
I think it would be a gesture, but thats just me.
Either way, its a thing you kinda have to include if you want it or not
Try burlap behind the check dams. Cheap and easy to find. Geo textile will eventually breakdown and leave you with micro plastics.
Avoid plastics, organics will degrade eventually but not turn into micro plastic poison
Micro plastics are the last thing you need in your soil, or heading on out to the ocean.
Take a look at how a beaver builds its dams. They really know how to mix in organic material to slow down river flow.
Or you know, just plant material he has on the land already.
I love these videos, keep'em coming! If Oxford Canyon is yours, you should get some tips from Bill Zeedyk & Van Clothiers' book "Let the water do the work" and start to build angled baffles to Induce Meandering into the stream. If the canyon is not on your property, you should really contact whoever owns it and do a joint effort. That's a LOT of water more or less wasted. :)
Come to think of it, you should get that book regardless, it is full of knowledge that will do your project much more successful.
It's a protected waterway
Fantastic to see the check dams working. I'm very impressed with this project. I really look forward to coming along on the journey with you.
I also played with rocks for years just to relax. . i think we used to build such a dams in prehistoric times it feels natural to do... like hunting
“Where water runs make it walk, where it walks make it crawl, where it crawls make it sit, where it sits it will soak. “ -Mollison or Lawton. Check dams are fine to slow the water but if you try to make them perfect they will always eventually wash out or cause
adjacent erosion. Thanks, enjoying your process. Best of luck.
These dams are great, and you are learning a lot, especially as water is flowing to and through them. I wanted to suggest, again, that the hills that slope down on your property need to have swales so catch the water coming down them, allowing the water to soak into the hills, which should in a few years also start to drain out at the bottom of the hills. It might even make for a semi-regular stream part to all year as you transform the hills with trees, shrubs and grasses. Trees should be planted on the downslope of the swales. You will likely need to water them periodically a few times a week until enough water has absorbed into the ground and the roots have gone down deep enough to reach the water. The shade from the trees will also help to prevent a lot of evaporation leaving the ground wetter longer for the plants and grasses.
Now that you've got the check dams, focus on the hillside swales.
The next step might be to figure out where you can build a large pond for the excess water and overflow from the swales in the case of heavy monsoon rains. The pond could then be used to water the newly planted trees and shrubs.
Your bathtubs had lots of green where none was before they appeared. I watched them as you walked past. Ideally when building a check dam, dig a ditch 2' wide, 6" to 1' deep and a foot into the bank. Put your largest rocks in the ditch and get close fits. Take your time filling and packing them. Apply water as you fill the ditch, this will allow the bank/ditch to become more solid. Save the flat rocks and embed them into the upstream banks to prevent erosion. The middle of the dam should be at least 6" to 1' lower than the sides. I suggest acquiring a collapsible shovel. I use a US WWII army shovel with the 3' foot handle, I recommend them. Lost mine for 9 months outside while ... and when I found it, barely any rust. Great tool.
you're not alone, we're with you in spirit. Not only are you doing good work, you're inspiring thousands to do the same.
It’s totally awesome how that dry hot desert has puddles. Your rock dams are making a difference. I’m like you the water sounds are so soothing.
Another Great Episode! Thank You Shaun! God Bless
Sean, I've been researching several species of Sumac trees. I'm now convinced that they have huge potential to rapidly create micro-climates in your washes and greatly accelerate transformation of your desert wasteland. I'm primarily referring here to the larger species which in five years can reach 10 feet by by ten years reach 20 - 30 feet in both height and diameter. But there are also sumac species which grow only 2 - 6 feet tall, The smaller species would retain your soil in but would not reach heights jointly creating local canopies a under which microclimates would exist.
Other than the undesirable "poison sumac" (which grows only in wetlands anyway) most species are extremely drought tolerant and spread rapidly through underground rhizomes covering large, open spaces, forming colonies - and jungle-style canopies!
The large African sumac thrives in Arizona and might be the easiest to get started there. But even the species found in wet temperate climates around the world (and here New England), once established, will thrive and reproduce rapidly. The familiar red fruits will attract wildlife, including birds, which will spread the seeds.
In your situation I would create a conveniently located wire-caged nursery with hundreds of seedlings -- perhaps mostly African (grows 2 feet per year, can reach 30 feet tall) and staghorn sumacs (reach 15 to 25 feet tall, but might need more care to get established in the first year or two in your desert), protect them from herbivores, water them for a few months, maybe a year, and then plant them in a half dozen or more washes, in groups of ten or more, each group clustered closely enough to quickly establish micro-micro climates utilizing each other's respiratory moisture (perhaps one square yard per seedling at first, with the option of transplanting half of them when they have begun to compete with each other.
When you plant your seedlings in erosion-prone washes try staking 8' x 12' sections of chicken wire to the soil, and planting the seedlings in the wire mesh to protect them from floodwaters while they get their roots down deep enough to survive heavy rains. You might have to cut wire from around their bases after two or three years of growth so they won't be choked by the chicken wire when their trunks exceed two inches in diameter.
A reply would be appreciated if you find this interesting. - JH
Tell me my budding dendrologist, what is the scientific name of the sumac which eaten as a delicacy in Turkey.
"Eaten as a delicacy?" I assume you mean that a spice is made from the seeds throughout the Middle East. Or are you referring to the sumac "leaves" that some people eat when they are very small and tender in the spring? I've tried them. Not great. Edible. A delicacy? Maybe there's some way to prepare them...? What am I missing about this delicacy? @@estebancorral5151
Shaun thanks for sharing. When I worked on a park in South Texas we used bags of cement to channel and hold water. It can be a bit expensive. Maybe you could use sandbags with a mixture of sand and clay as the base for your check dams? That should stop most of the water from just passing through.
Letting the water pass through is a good thing with check dams, as making a pond and keeping the water isn't the goal. You're trying to "check" the speed of the water flowing down the channel, which makes silt fall out of solution onto the creek bed and eventually build up.
In my years of playing with rock dams... a strong pebble game and mashed up dried cow patties on the upstream side, has been quite effective. I have also learned that if I want to catch sediment to play mostly outside of the main washes with the one rock dams, earthworks in the wash is extremely satisfying to watch but is a losing battle with lots of rebuilding. Although when one loses a dam, the rock deposit is generally in a prime location to build a new one that will hold and catch. I am in the high desert on open range.
I love your work, this project is something near and dear to my heart.
i cant fully explain why but this channel has becaome one of the only few channels i actually look forward to seeing every new video from
Dear Shaun, thank you so much for your videos. As I've been bed-bound from Covid for 2 years now, videos like these are a way to see things outside my bedroom.
I've always wanted to do something like this - adapting a (much smaller) property to changing climate and making it more robust and livable. Now I can live that a little through you. Fascinating stuff and I like your style of documenting the process!
If you like building stuff too, check out "Tokyo Llama". He and his Japanese wife bought an abandoned (stunning) house in Japan and over 4 years of hard work he's almost done.
Japan was nearly closed to immigration but has suddenly looked at statistics and realized immigration is the only way to keep their country strong.
adddude- Increase d 3. walk in the sun daily for 2 hours with no shirt and walk in the forest. take d3. ester c and zinc daily. eat 90% fruits and veggies and only drink spring water. make celery juice and drink on emply stomach in the am. read books about celer y ju ice. thanks
This makes me so happy to see the rain coming and the baths filling up. Congratulations S.
Kind of funny spends the episode being super happy about his trickles of water coming down his baby dams. Then tries to leave and sees a rushing river going down the road.
Way to go Shaun. Very cool. Hope you survived the storm! I love a good cliffhanger!
Dude, every one of your videos is so inspiring. I’ve been watching a couple a day since discovering your channel. I watch your progress and then go out and work on my little food forest. I think you’ve motivated me to do at least twice as much work on my food forest project as I normally manage.
Edit: on the topic of your Little Rock dams. If your soils have a bit of clay, you can easily reinforce the check dams by working while it’s wet and packing clay and mud into the rocks.
Nice job. I have made dams all my life and it is a tradition of my family to make them wherever we picnic. Big stones at the back and on the bottom, everything else facing the flow. You can arch it across the span for additional strength. Like a good wine, a well made dam only gets stronger with time as all the sediment and organic material clogs the gaps. Dams aerate the water as they form rapids and only provide good to an area.
You need a big slope of stone at the bottom - a buttress. Water takes the path of least resistance. So take out some stones at the top center so it takes the path where you want it to channel. Otherwise it will pool up and spill toward the banks and wash out smaller stones and particles. People need to be doing this work everywhere! Good for you.
This reminds me of some of my happiest times going down to the local brook with my brother and making a dam with rocks so that I could catch more sticklebacks and stone loaches.
I don't know if any grasses will grow there, but they are excellent in keeping soil together and preventing run-off. What would be ideal if the check-dams were planted with grass.
wow! nice. Love your channel. And as a marketer I would like to highlight that I like seeing your videos on a weekly basis. Every Sunday morning here in Dubai I enjoy your videos and it became for me as a reality show. Thank you Shaun! Consistency is a key for your channel and yeah... your content is so cool! Happy you got those rainfalls and now we all see the results of your work and how the system can be improved! Good luck!
You are now the beaver sir. good job.
I love watching these restoration projects, and my love to " Stop The Water" is perhaps getting to much! I have studied water in one way or another all my life and my brain was nearly exploding watching some of this and you have to know, I love what you are doing and the channel but god damn, " All the lovely water". OK, So you got yourself some lovely French Drains in places, but what you want is some stone beaver dams. Stack the largest stones at the back 60 degrees slope , to down stream and 30 degrees to the up stream, in a C shape, on a bed of small slow filtrating stones. Make that a solid structure by itself, have it lowest in the middle of/ furthest down stream point of your structure, the level you want to water to come up to and leave. NOW " Crucially " layer stones in order of size. A wall of the next size down rocks, on the up stream side, and if there a stones or rocks that will fill in the gaps between the rocks and wont wash through, do it And continue, smaller and smaller on the up stream, on 30 degrees, " A ramp for the water, Not a wall!" Take some of the bank away , on the up stream so that you have a bowl pool shape before the check dam. So the banks and flow direct to the center of the check Dam, the most reinforced part of the wall. For larger volumes of water, add feet of flat level rocks after the 30 degree ramp, before the drop of of 60ish degrees. Ha! for a skate boarder it's a flat box with a 30 degree slop to upstream wit a 60 degree down stream. If that helps 😆 In a c-ish shape. Layers of cardboard dissolving, materials, grasses, weeds in the layers of rock will help gather the materials that are washing through your Check Dams. I know a lot of work, But I am sure there are some nice spots that will pool big and perhaps deserve the extra attention. Good Luck on the endeavour! I look forward to the results of this rain fall. All of it. The settling, any greening. man if you had a shovel and just dug out the bank and put it on the upstream bank, fro the bottom up until you had a nice ramp you probably could have stopped all the water up to check dam over flow level and it would be just building and building sediment and the over flow is important.
Hi Shaun. I've been watching your journey for a while now and appreciate you showing the ups and downs. I've watched other videos where people are doing similar things and two things have caught my attention.
A year or two from now when the greening starts and things start changing, you will want to show comparisons of before and after. With that in mind, have you thought of taking specific pictures of an area with the plan to reproduce the shot from the same location and angle later? Perhaps you can plant some stakes or fence posts to use as markers of specific areas. Also, that would allow people watching to recognize specific areas, because right now its hard to tell one section from another. It may also help you track how long it takes each area to change.
With the bathtubs, have you considered adding a layer of compost and brush to them? This should help with water retention, and provide nutrients to the soil for anything trying to sprout. Which if possible you could plant a variety of seeds in various areas to see what will thrive with minimal investment of resources. As for compost I'm sure it would be a process moving loads out there. But perhaps if there is a local tree company they would be willing to provide you with compost which they need to dispose of, and you could bring it out in smaller loads with you. Perhaps you can mark each bathtub that you are able to do this to with stakes or marker to track which seeds you try in them.
Now that you have received some good rain you can see which bathtubs are receiving water and can focus on those first.
Reading through the comments, I know you receive a lot of suggestion of items to try and I imagine that time and labor to implement is a large factor in what you can to and when. I will continue watching your journey and wish you success.
Seeing the green landscape and the subtle, steady improvements is inspiring and uplifting. Go forth and conquer.
clay on the backside of the dams could be a cheap way to reinforce, depending what kind of soil you have on the property
larger settling ponds could be used to trap silt / clay which then later can be used for more construction projects.
😮 Clay is made of the finest particles. Are you planning on firing the clay dam in a mobile kiln to harden it?
8 thumbs up, oh my days!!!! 😆
@twofingeredmamma - clay is used to seal up the bottom of ponds! It's great as is and holds water extremely well. So much so that it's very hard to garden in clay soils as it stays so wet and doesn't drain. When it dries it's like concrete its so hard!
Sealing isn't what he needs to be doing here, unless he's trying to make a pond. You want water to be able to leak through and over the dam, just slowed down enough that material will drop out and deposit as silt. The trick here is to have many of these leaky dams slowing things down all along the way.
@@roo-dog3484 Clay is great at stopping the leakage of stationary water but the particles are very light and moving water will start removing them.
I might be sitting on the couch watching this alone, but it feels like I’m talking to someone! Thanks for what you do!
Dude I've been waiting 3-4 days for this vid.
I knew that rains would come your way, and boost your morale. You're a cool dude, Shawn and all the way from NYC, I wish you nothing but the best.
May I suggest that you put the smaller rocks on the UPHILL side of the dam? By putting them on the downside, water pressure will build up and push them away. if they are on the upside, then they are seate in place better,
I am over 60 now and I live in The Netherlands but as a young child I used to play with my friends when we lived in Surinam we always played in the rain making channels and dams in our garden, my mom wasn’t to happy about it of course 😁
Have you thought about using rabbit wire as a cheap way to contain the rocks within the gabion? This could keep them from falling apart, and saves lots of time rebuilding after every rain event.
I accidentily invented a Hydraulic Dam maker when I was 12.
I built a solid low dam 18 inches deep, across a little creek, and for laughs, put a 2 inch pipe about 6 inches below the top.
It made a lovely little fountain, of course.
I'm now 50 years older. The dam is still intact, but there is a pond 6 feet deep by 15 feet across on the bottom side of the dam, after years of fountain digging.
It occurred to me that this might work to develop ponds in your water courses.
Just a thought.
To protect the banks from eroding you can either dig out and set rocks in the banks (high labor input) or line the river bed walls upstream of check dam, higher than your spillway.
Also suggest lining the spillway from your road with rocks to stop erosion.
Hope you can add a retention pond one day.👍
It's very satisfying to see the check dams and bathtubs functioning. Keep it up!
Do you think that earthbags used as the core for your check dams might help with reducing the leaks?
Also have you considered using the billboard tarps as a water catchment for your camp and for building purposes?
Amazing to see that massive amount of water flowing by.
If you plan on building more check-dams, try using 10lb bags of sawdust and some compost from your kitchen to create a slurry.
The slurry should help plug some of the holes within and also help in creating the required organic matter that would grant better stability to the microenvironment.
Cardboard YES! I work in a Hardware/Feed store. All of the feed comes in on pallets. Each pallet's flat base has a 40 x 48 " piece of cardboard on the bottom before the feed is stacked on the pallet. We get 100's of pallets each month and always have a stack of carboard. I use it at home on the ground to keep the weeds and lots of other projects. THE BEST PART IS "ITS FREE"!!!!!!! So go find a feed store and ask them for cardboard from the pallets. Sure they will be HAPPY to give it to you. It breaks down and creates soil....
If you can find a local source of clay you can use that to secure your check dam’s like they do when building ponds. Once it hardens it holds water perfectly. Great job!
They're called check dams not stop dams. He doesn't want the water to stop, just to slow down 🤙
@@olsim1730 he asked how to seal them. Clay organically seals them. Your input brings zero value to the conversation at hand.
@@guillermodelnoche Shaun needs to learn more about how to correctly build check dams & their purpose. He needs to slow down the water & reduce the flow force to allow silt to naturally fill in the gaps between the stones. The goal is to keeps the water longer on the ground to allow it to soak into the ground instead of just flowing by. He is trying to hydrate the ground to allow plants to grow. It is a process that takes time. Patience is needed.
@@lorettarussell3235 I’m completely aware of how this works. I have successfully rerouted water into my water tables using stone stack check dams. I used red clay from 10 miles away to make a bowl shape that held the water against the dam, didn’t erode the sides of my wash and I have an extreme amount of flowers and grass due to it in two years. I’m telling him that clay is a great natural resource to hold the water at a location and allow the excess to overflow not damaging the dam. I have done this successfully. I appreciate you explaining what he is doing but I assure you it works in actuality.
What you do is AWESOME. You are AWESOME. Thank you for documenting and inspiring us. ❤❤❤
Use clay in and around your rocks, that should plug the dams up.
Don't forget the branches and deadwood to build over the dam.
When ever tightening a dam, you hold more water. More water has more potential to destroy your dam. Shaun is doing great in also strengthening the banks and widening it. You want a slow and steady flow over as wide as you can get it. That's why they build weirs often in a zig zag pattern.
Or cow dung With those shrubs green leaves.. Even after, cow dung work as natural manure..
*Should* he be plugging the dams up? The idea here is to slow the water, not make a deep pond (which might be an option further down the line). Better to add more rocks on the downstream side to thicken the dam and slow the water that much more and add stability.
@@NezumiWorks with clay you can plug as much as you want or don't want. Clay is versitile.
I work on a desert ranch in the Big Bend region and we have dams to collect water for the local fauna and livestock.. The biggest problem you have with all of the check dams is they are WAY TO SMALL. You need to at minimum triple the thickness and double the height for each dam. Additionally as your building the dams add a couple of shovels of the dirt between the rocks for the bottom 1/3 to 1/2 of the dam. The top third should just be larger rocks, that are big and heavy enough to not get washed away but with enough gaps to allow overflow water to flow though and not top or wash the sides away of the dirt on the dam sides.
Hope that helps.
I'm no expert, but I think it might slow down the water even more if it didn't go in such a narrow and steep canal at the bottom of the canyon. Using cut and fill, I would experiment with making the stretch between a few checkdams more flat/in level. So, dig out material just beneath a checkdam and dump it on the next checkdam. Also, encourage it to meander from side to side in an s-pattern between two checkdams, so the water has a longer time to travel and less energy/speed to carry the sediments away. I don't know, but it might be worth experimenting with. Maybe I would try to dig a small pool beneath a few checkdams, to mimic the natural waterfall pools you see where the kinetic energy from the stream is dissipated before the water gently flows further downstream. Then you can test the soil after the rains to see if now sediment accumulated and it retained more moisture. You are a true inspiration and I really enjoy following your posts! Thanks for the video.
Yup. Loved playing in the creek & creating dams as a kid. Heck, even now that'd be fun!
Learn from the beaver. they use logs because its dispers the force reducing the impact reducing washout.
they use logs cause they are beavers nothing more.
You’re forgetting some important steps regarding the beaver. First I know of No Beaver damns built in dry river beds. I could go on but whats the point…
You have stuff growing in your bathtubs! 😍😍😍😍
I’m loving watching the iterative process of you learning and improving each check damn as you do it. We just watched you level up your check damn game in real time 🥰 well done 😁😁😁
Find some clay on the property and line the inside of your check dams with it.
Wow!
The natural terraces are slowing the water downhill. More water for a pond at the bottom of the hill. Good luck!
Some bales of straw will help your check dams
2:45 Likely the water eroded the soil around it. It's what happens when you don't slow down the water enough, if you allow the water to freefall from the far end of the barrier it gets all the momentum back it need to come down with a gradual slope that way you have friciton all the way.
Have you checked with the county to see if there are limits to the amount of dirt that can be moved without a permit? I'd like to see you build a large dam and pond using old wood, brush, chainlink and rocks covered with dirt.
Fill the back side of the dam, the water collection area, with organic material. That will slow the water enough to allow it to seep in rather than flow by.
Sorry buddy, but most of your "checkdams" looks like what we did as kids, just scale it up adequately for the landscape.
I've got a big stone in my tummy seeing that crazy parking spot, instead of on an elevated hilltop! You are able to walk a few steps!
Second :P
Just stumbled upon your videos and I love your idea. I bet that desert rain smells amazing .
It does!
First
Looking good Shaun! Great to see your check dams working. Keep it up!
You are doing what we all would like to be doing. Keep up the effort
You should set up some cameras to watch those dams of yours.
You'd be amazed how little water it takes to upset a man-made structure, especially one that's so haphazardly slapped together.
Might also want to read up on how beavers go about doing this.
They use progressively smaller material kind of like the roof on an adobe.
I do admire and commend these efforts regardless of how they have been implemented.
My guy!!!! You're really inspiring me out of a dark place..you're so awesome 😊
Beautiful water. So nice to see all the hard work has begun to pay off.
Hope this reaches you because I was watching your video just wishing I could assist and get my own hands dirty. I like watching your thought process and think you’d be a cool dude to work with on something like this. I think overall you have a good grasp of where the rain is funneling to and going however something’s i have done my self and experienced is that the rain will continue to penetrate through the dams unless you you use a variety of sized rocks down to sand. Fabrics or weed mats may work but I’ve personally seen a variety use of materials while construction like sand and small rocks and big rocks all intertwined the dams would be retaining a lot more water. Let me know if that helps. Love to hear more about it!
Besides of the hints of all the other helpful posters, I want to recommend including dried gras and woodsticks IN the center of your dams - from ground up. The more, the better. This is important to give the smallest pieces of gravel a chance to get stuck IN the dam. You'll see, it's easy to do and has great affect to the dam.
Keep on doing your amazing work - I wish you good luck to get the desert green! :)
I love the sound and smell of rain in the desert. nice work!
Ideally you position hay bails in front of the rocks in all the contour runs, they could also be much longer, connecting setting (bath) to setting using the setting spill ways…..
In the bottom of the little wash out if you dig deeper you might find clay you can use to seal your little check dams. I could be too late for the party though.
Hey there; I live in the Sth. Australian desert, and I love your posts. Keep em coming.
Love seeing this, the natural flow and how the check dams work, and where they aren't working, awesome to catch this as rain is falling, can truly see what's needed and why. this is just awesome!
I'm trying to watch all channel content from the beginning, want to see the progress and changes as occur. Great content!!
Source your rocks from outside the riparian zone. Build a check dam with T-posts, wire fencing, and rocks. Use whole haybales and also spread them in the wash upstream of the dam. Whole haybales can be T posted right into the ground. Prune deadwood off of any of the shrubs outside the riparian zone. Did this method with the forest service in OR 30 yrs ago on a 15 mile stretch of river that yielded enough gold in the 1880s that everyone moved in, cut all the trees and made log cabins and hydro-mined for about 10 yrs B4 they all left. Cattle ranchers stayed and the river dried up.
I'd be interested to know how you got the rocks to the location if your bringing them in. Aside from the dam in the road, it's extremely difficult to get anything around there. That's also where we threw the track on the mini ex. It's rough terrain
Haybales can stay moist for weeks after a thorough soaking. Can you get haybales in there with your rocks on top and all around? Detritus in the riparian zone is the most important factor. The water itself will fill all of the cracks and holes in the dam if you add organic material upstream.
@@dustupstexas can you get haybales in on a quad or something? Haybales really work way better than anything else. Not that we didn't use rocks but they wanted organic matter first and foremost.
It's encouraging that the water is slowing down enough to pool. I suspect some of the impoundments need to be much larger. Woodfalls and cardboard could be helpful. Also desert grass seed mix may be a good thing to buy and keep in stock as well.
One thing I might try is digging out 2 or 3 small ponds at your check dams. Make the banks 2 or 3 feet wide using the dirt and rocks dug out from the ponds. This can all be done by hand and you don’t need heavy equipment just a few hours of digging. Then force the flow to go to the side before it goes to the next pond. If you can slow it to the point of swirling then a lot will be able to soak into the ground. Your areas where the water is spreading and swirling around the bushes look best in my opinion. Also when you’re building up your dam you should have a shovel with you to take sediment out of the pool from the upstream side to pile on the dam rather than the downstream. Otherwise you’re just creating waterfalls. Which is fine if there’s a bid pool to catch water but not really helpful to prevent erosion. Also you might consider putting in some willow stakes now if you’re going to a wetter season. Keep up the great work. 320 acres is a huge project. I have 10 acres and I’m constantly working on it. I can’t even imagine the scale on 320. Honestly your project is hugely inspiring!
Well, you are talking to us. I like playing the water like that.
Your dams are working!
I would also get a small tractor and start pushing the rocks to the road and slowly build roads. Buy a used tractor and rent it out to locals when not using it to pay for it.
In a year you will have great rock roads. Keep up the good work !!