Zach Altman: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the On Land Podcast. I’m Zach Altman, and today we’re doing things a little differently. We’re kicking off an ongoing mini series here at the show, all about water in the west. We’re calling it, you guessed it, On Land, On Water, and our guide in this new water series is none other than Thomas Plank.

A new member of the comms team here at Western Landowners Alliance. Hey there, Thomas.

Thomas Plank: Hey Zach.

Zach Altman: Uh, so how long have you been with WLA now?

Thomas Plank: I started with WLA in May of this year, so a little over six months, which means I have had just the right amount of time to realize how deep the water world actually is.

Zach Altman: Yeah. Just enough to be dangerous now, and we’re throwing you into the deep end. With making podcasts now. But I understand you have a background in journalism, is that right? 

Thomas Plank: That is right. So after grad school, I worked as a journalist for just under four [00:01:00] years in Montana and Idaho. Uh, I never actually did any radio reporting, but I really wanted to do radio reporting.

So I think you can probably trace this particular podcast back to that, even though I’ve been working for nonprofits and communications since 2021. It’s really nice to get back to those journalism roots.

Zach Altman: Great. So tell us about this on Land on Water series. What can folks expect to learn about here?

Thomas Plank: We’re gonna be doing a lot of talking about water in the West, but what we wanna emphasize, and what I wanna emphasize is that. This mini series is going to be really focused on practical knowledge. Uh, we’re gonna be talking about things like dry land farming, removing tamaris and Russian olive, Zeedyk structures, and how you can work with your neighbors for water conservation and sharing.

We’re gonna be talking to Landowners. We’re gonna be talking to experts, but the goal is to provide information that producers and people who are working in ag or [00:02:00] just caring for their land. Are able to learn about these important topics.

Zach Altman: Great. Uh, well, I can’t wait to learn about all this alongside our listeners.

Uh, but for now, what are we getting into today?

Thomas Plank: Rock, weirs, uh, slowing water, actually as our guest is hopefully going to point out very early in this particular podcast.

Zach Altman: Great. Well, I’ll let you take it from here, Thomas. Thanks so much.

Thomas Plank: Thanks, Zach.

Erik Kalsta: It’s not new technology. This is ancient stuff that we’ve forgotten about and we’ve maybe allowed new technology to, to go past.

You know, I think a lot of what our country did, you know, in the fifties, sixties and seventies, was so focused on efficiency that we for forgot some of these smaller techniques.

Thomas Plank: Today we are diving into a topic with plenty of ripple effects. Rock weirs. Just one way to slow down water and reduce [00:03:00] erosion on the landscape. And slowing water down is a top priority for today’s guest who ranches in the Big Hole Valley in southwest Montana.

Erik Kalsta: I’m Erik Kalsta. I ranch here at Kalsta Ranch. My family’s been ranching here for a little over 125 years. I’m also the Working Wild Challenge Director for Western Landowners Alliance.

Thomas Plank: We’re here today to talk about rock weirs. What is a rock weir and how are you considering using them on this property?

Erik Kalsta: Well, Thomas, I’m not here to talk about rock weirs. I’m here to talk about slowing water down in a landscape. The reason that I’m doing that is we have a landscape that only gets seven inches of precipitation a year. That limits our ability to do almost anything. [00:04:00] And if we can get that water to percolate into the soil, into the subsoil aquifer, or even stay a little closer to the surface, we can help some plant life.

If it gets into that subsoil aquifer because of our tertiary gravels, it’s gonna return to the river, returning to the river, it’ll come in cold, about 50 to 60 degrees, and that cold water will support the fishery, which means I will have less problems dealing with the sporting community who are constantly worried about their fish.

And we also wanna support that fishery because, well, we enjoy it and we’ve been enjoying it for a long time.

Thomas Plank: So I guess to back up, we should start with. Where exactly are we right now?

Erik Kalsta: Sure. We’re in the Big Hole River and I think they’d call us the lower Big Hole. I’m always a little confused, even living here where all the lines are [00:05:00] drawn, but we are between Glen and Mount Towns of Glen and Melrose on the Big Hole River. It currently, as the river comes past us, it is generally running south. It’ll take a, a large bend and, and turn east and then northeast before it intersects with Ruby and the Beaverhead to become the Jefferson. But we’re under the, on one side, we’re under the rain shadow of the Pioneers, both east and west Pioneers, probably at the widest point of that mountain range. And then McCarty Mountain, kind of an old pre Rocky Mountain mountain is right directly behind the ranch, which kind of further splits any moisture that may have made it over, over the range. So that’s what puts us in this unusually dry spot.

Thomas Plank: The Big Hole [00:06:00] is the center of a drought donut. Seven inches of moisture per year means bad drought years can have major impacts for producers like Erik, his neck of the woods has been in moderate to exceptional drought regularly over the past two decades, according to historical data.

You’re also raising livestock on this property, right?

Erik Kalsta: That’s correct. I mean our, like many ranchers in the Big Hole, we have kind of a migratory livestock plan. The seven inches of moisture while it limits our ability to grow feed and means we need a lot more acres on the dry land, we are able to grow hay in our irrigated lands and that hay works for the winter.

And in general, we don’t get much snow in the winter. So we have a nice open winter here. It’s why many Native American tribes used to kind of winter in this part of the valley. So this is a wintering area. And in general, what people do [00:07:00] here is they move into higher altitudes, like the upper Big Hole Valley in the summer, which is also a wetter area and has most of the snow pack we survive off of down here in the winter through irrigation

Thomas Plank: And with that aspect, slowing water down becomes even more important, not just for the health of the watershed, which is, as you said, very important to you personally and for just the general health and wellbeing of this area, but also for your own crops and livestock.

Erik Kalsta: Yes, less important for the crops, but I think in the future, the importance of slowing water on the landscape will increase even for our crops.

Right now, I think in, maybe the fifth year of a prolonged drought, that has impacted even those of us with really good water rights and our ability to pull water out of the river. I work with the Big Hole Watershed Committee and we are very [00:08:00] cooperative in working with Recreationalists to keep water in the river, to float the fish, and we sacrifice some of our ability and I guess harvest by letting a little bit of our water go back to the stream to keep that functional.

Thomas Plank: So the Big Hole Watershed Committee is something that I’ve heard about before. Could you explain a little bit more of how that kind of came to be and how you and your property became part of it?

Erik Kalsta: Well, not everyone will agree with me, but when the Big Hole Watershed Committee.

It kind of arose, I think it officially came into being in 1995, although it was moving into a formalized structure prior to that, it really arose out of a series of fist fights that came out of the drought of 1988 and recreationists and [00:09:00] ranchers were pointing fingers, but over time the catalyst there was the Arctic grayling was going to be listed, and that listing threat meant that ranchers would lose access to their water to keep proper streamflow in.

And it also meant that recreationists and, you know, we talk about wild trout, that’s not native trout. And the wild trout, the brown trout and the, excuse me, the rainbows were having a real impact on the native species. And so what would be one of the solutions, it would be removing those wild non-native trout and when everyone understood that they were going to be impacted, it was a lot easier to work together. That was the catalyst, and that’s what really brought the watershed committee into being.

Thomas Plank: The upper Big Hole River [00:10:00] is one of the last remaining strongholds in the lower 48 for native Arctic Grayling. A fish that once thrived across the upper Missouri River, but nearly disappeared due to dams, mining and drought.

To turn things around, the committee, which is made up of ranchers, conservationists, and state and federal partners, secured the upper Big Hole Candidate Conservation Agreement with Assurances () CCAA) in 2009. It’s a voluntary partnership with local ranchers that helps improve streamflows and habitat on working lands while providing legal protections for Landowners who participate.

Today, 31 ranchers are enrolled covering more than 160,000 private acres that are working on irrigation, upgrades, riparian restoration, and maintaining flows to support grayling recovery. For more on this check, our Arctic Grayling episode of Working Wild University. We’ll link that in the show notes.

Okay. Back to rock weirs.

Can you gimme a little bit of the history that you’ve learned trying [00:11:00] to put this together and, and can you talk to me a little bit about how you came to decide on these projects?

Erik Kalsta: Sure. So as a kid, and I mean a little kid like, four years old to probably eight or 10. My daycare in the summer was with my grandfather, and we would go flood irrigate one of our small upper ranches.

Those lessons, watching how water ran, watching how it absorbed into the soil, those all kind of impacted my thought process. So by the time I got into my teens and I experienced a few flash floods on the ranch, we call ’em gully washers, I began trying to actively slow water down and I had talked to no one about this.

I knew nothing about it. My dad would not give me any [00:12:00] resources to do it. But if he parked a loader down on the lower ranch when I was down irrigating, I’d sometimes run up the draw and try to build a dam or do something that I thought might work. And over time, what I have done has not become less crude, but it’s become easily replicable. And the reason we find ourselves talking about rock weirs a lot is because, and you’ll see when we get out on the landscape, that’s the readily available material. I like to say “on my ranch there’s not a lot of dirt in my dirt.” We have stuff that that we can work with that’s on the surface that we don’t have to transport there.

It saves a great deal on costs and we can kind of attack the problem close at hand, and that’s our focus.

Thomas Plank: Erik took me on a ranch tour after this conversation where we ranged up and down his property for a few hours in his vehicle.[00:13:00] 

Erik Kalsta: When we started this project, this draw was a sand bottom draw, sand and rocks, no vegetation as you can see now. I mean, it’s got a mix. It’s got quite a little bit of cheat grass because the elk use this draw kind of as a pathway, and the sheep used it as well to come out of the field. So it gets a lot of disturbance.

You’ve got a little bit of prickly pear, you got cheat grass. We have some Indian rice grass. We have a few other things in here that are showing up. What’s interesting here is that the volume has changed and now we’re up in that four to 500% more [00:14:00] biomass than we did, than we had before. They’re just building a rock wall across the, across the draw.

Sometimes when we have real high flows, we get rocks displaced out of this and we have to rebuild, but for the most part, it holds together. You’ll see behind it, we get rocks displaced out of this, and we have to rebuild. But for the most part, it holds together. You’ll see behind it. Um, wild Rockies Field Institute, they harvested some ryegrass seed, mixed it with some wool, and they put some in here behind this weir.

And they put a lot in other places, higher on this hill that, uh, hopefully will get the, the, um, rye grass started and started out competing the, uh, cheatgrass, which has been the most effective way for us to deal with it on these small patches.

Thomas Plank: Erik isn’t doing this alone. [00:15:00] He works with students from various institutions, including the University of Montana, Western, just down the road in Dillon.

Waste wool from Erik’ s sheep is repurposed to help retain water and build soil. It contributes nutrients as it breaks down, giving native grasses a leg up in order to compete with invasive species like cheat grass.

Erik Kalsta: Now as we go up through here, you’ll see like this we here, I came up here with a backhoe and took a couple scoops out behind them.

Build small sediment pits and you’ll see where, you know, things are dropping out. The different weeds are in there, they’re gray, they’re starting to build up. Uh, the volume of grass is increasing as well. And as the grass increases, especially on the south side here, with all the prickly pair, it’s starting to compete with the prickly pair.

Now, here’s one of probably the biggest changes [00:16:00] that we’ve seen. If you look right across there, it’s a small bush. It’s, I don’t know what, three feet wide by two and a half feet tall. That’s a rosebush. There’s absolutely no reason for a rosebush to be growing up here. It didn’t get planted here by me. I’m guessing it was a bird or some other animal came up here and had that, and yet from a draw that was completely sand bottom, we’ve got a higher volume of grasses and forbs, our woodies, plants such as rubber rabbitbrush and stuff have increased in volume. And then we’ve got strange things like that growing here. So we’re seeing a transition and that speaks to the fact that we’re keeping more water in this draw.

Thomas Plank: There are a lot of rock weirs, somewhere around a half dozen or more per gully in this [00:17:00] part of the ranch. They don’t look like much. And I wouldn’t have spotted them or expected they were weirs, had Erik not pointed them out. A foot or two tall, they’re just a line of rocks stacked together like a little stone wall waiting for their chance to slow down the water and build up the soil.

Erik Kalsta: You’ll see as we go up these draw, and this is important, as the gradient increases, the number of weirs has to increase. And remember, the goal isn’t to hold the water back. It isn’t to create ponding, it isn’t to create little lakes. It is simply to slow it and drop out sediment. That slowing allows the soil pores to open up.

It allows them to get wetted enough to allow water penetration. And, let’s see. I’m looking for one more spot up here. Oh, it’s right there. So what we’re looking at here. It is a natural weir. [00:18:00] Those big rocks, they were just there and things eroded out around them and below them and what that created.

You’ll see this plant here now. It’s clearly had better days. But we’re looking at a plant that’s, once again, a probably three foot diameter and three foot high. At this point, a lot of it’s dead, but, but some of it’s making a comeback.

This is curly leaf mahogany. Curly leaf mahogany occurs on McCarty, but it’s usually about 700 to a thousand feet higher, and it’s in an area where the rock is tipped vertical, and there are large splits between the, the vertical layers that fills with organic detritus. And that’s generally what this plant establishes in. Establishes an area where it can get better moisture, natural moisture traps, and [00:19:00] better soil.

As a result to find it here is unusual. And that got me thinking about this plant that we’re looking at now. I first saw when I was 15 years old, I’m 58 now, so that was when I started thinking about how to do this. And like I said, the plant, it’s, it’s got an inner core here where there’s an area about a size of a basketball, maybe that’s still alive and the rest of the plant is kinda suffering. And that might be speaking more to our last five years of drought or just to the overall age of the plant. I’m not sure, but the fact that these natural structures, you’ll even see it up on the, up on the flat here you’ll see a, a large boulder that’s poking out of the ground and on the northern side of it, I think probably [00:20:00] between dew collection because of the temperature variability and what else it’s blocking.

You’ll see a gooseberry bush, you know, out here among the cactus and prickly pear. If we can kind of mimic what nature’s doing. To our own advantage, and we don’t think about it just as growing grass, but we think about it as the ecosystem as a whole, we also have to think about it as, you know, this is not something that is going to change things this year.

We have to think in terms of decades. We can make changes that will offset some of the impacts of climate change

Thomas Plank: Pretty, pretty big stuff just from moving a few rocks into a gully, or rather having children move a few rocks into a gully.

Erik Kalsta: Yeah, yeah. Well, I’ve moved quite a few myself, but yeah, I, I prefer having the children do it.

Thomas Plank: But this is a really low tech solution, or [00:21:00] I don’t know if I’d call it a solution perhaps, but it’s a very low tech problem solving tool that’s available to people.

If there’s rocks around pretty much.

Erik Kalsta: Sure. I mean, and you know, you have to think about it. If, if we’re having a Rose Bush show up, we’ve got water closer to the surface. If we put in more of these, or if we have a wetter year, will we have a spring seep? If we have a spring seep? What are the logical outcomes.

Well, we know that it will help, at least small game, probably help bats, help birds could help big game, depending on how much water we see moving through this landscape. And then, you know, I, I mean, it’s, it’s change over time. That’s really what we’re looking for is change over time. And I don’t wanna say it’s, it’s a climate change solution or anything like that.

I, what I wanna say is it’s a range changing solution. It’s impact mitigation. It has helped to our entire system [00:22:00] on the ranch, but also, and we’re hoping to prove this because we work with Montana Bureau Mines and Geology with a lot of well work and trying to track where water’s moving. We’re hoping that we can show that we are bringing more water back all the way down three quarters or a mile away, or look more to that riparian area that everyone loves so much.

Nobody loves the cactus, but that’s where it starts.

Thomas Plank: So we’ve can kind of see how this can change the look of an area, you know, rose bush more woody bushes, curly leaf, mahogany, things that you normally wouldn’t think of being in this kind of rocky cactus range, but what are some of the pitfalls of doing work like this that you’ve run into? Is there anything that you think people should be aware of before [00:23:00] considering adding weirs into rangeland gullies, or is there anything that you wish that you had known before you started this?

Erik Kalsta: I think having a good knowledge of how water flows and cuts, and I think Zeedyk speaks to that really well.

Thomas Plank: Bill Zeedyk is a legend. If you’re interested in slowing water down on the land, well, you get into his namesake structures and how they work in a later episode.

Erik Kalsta: But understanding your soil and your landscape and the ability of your landscape to absorb water. You know, there are places where, for instance, if you put a bunch of pits in the ground and absorbed a lot of water, you could cause ground to move, you could cause a slide. That’s why I’m sticking to such small structures. Small impacts over long time is really my goal, because you could spend a lot of money and have heavy equipment come up here and do that, but, A. This land doesn’t bounce back from that kinda scarring very well, [00:24:00] and B. You could cause more problems.

We’ve seen dirt dams out in eastern Montana and central Montana, you know, that were put in 40, 50 years ago that have all washed out or been torn out largely because of some of the engineering failures. So. Build something simple. You know, if the engineering failure is that the water came too fast and knocked a few rocks over, either you can move that structure or you can put a few more rocks back.

I like the simplicity of it.

Thomas Plank: Right now we’re looking down the draw towards the rest of the Big Hole Valley, but most of these weirs are 20 to 30 feet across at most, and maybe two to three feet wide at their greatest width. But this is not, you don’t need an engineering or an architecture degree to complete one of these.

Erik Kalsta: No, no. And most of ’em are a couple feet high. We’re not building dams, we’re just slowing water.

Thomas Plank: You don’t need to [00:25:00] retain water, you just need to slow it down so it. Seep into the soil and then mother Nature does the rest of the work herself.

Erik Kalsta: And so whatever drops out will change the soil behind it and allow for better penetration.

It, it’s a compounding effect.

Thomas Plank: I think, Erik, from what I’m getting for your philosophy of range line management is small things, long time, but also regularity and understanding what you’re working with or more important things than, you know, just going out and building a dirt dam because you think that’s gonna stop water.

Erik Kalsta: Well, yeah, and I’ve got what, 50 some years of experience watching this landscape and 40 years of victories and failures in these little projects, and so my focus has become on the ones that I can see positive [00:26:00] results.

Music

The light grass there, the light colored grass, that’s all. Cheat grass and those are all elk trails that are, they’ve disturbed the hell out of that, coming out of the fields and then the cheatgrass moves in. So you know, a lot of our focus is trying to get another grass that’ll outcompete started at the top of the hill that will seed downhill.

But this little draw we’re looking at here, where this cheatgrass is down the bottom, there is a, there’s another sediment capture there. And then as you look up the draw, you can probably see a couple of little rock weirs as you’re working your way up. And then as you get farther up, you just look for woody vegetation and that’ll be growing behind nearly every weir.

And in all these little draws, we have at least a couple little weirs. And most of these were done between 2012 and 2016 in this area. So they’re fairly mature [00:27:00] and we’re starting to see changes that they have made. And now we’re also, that has been where our elk herd has expanded, and we’re now seeing more of the cheatgrass come in.

And so we’re trying to come up with ways to mitigate that.

Thomas Plank: And an important thing here is weirs aren’t just for rivers. Weirs are also for draws and gullies that are dry most of the year, but then in large rains are meant to slow sedimentation and otherwise. And I mean, that’s a very clever way of using this kind of technology.

And is this something that you came up with or is this something that you learned from others? Or how did you come to actually put rock weirs in gullies? 

Erik Kalsta: You know, that’s, that’s the funniest thing. Everybody always says, oh, it’s so innovative. And it’s like, you know, they were doing this in the Negreb Desert 6,000 years ago.

They were doing this in Nigeria 4,000 years ago, and you know, there are all these adaptations. You know, Bill Zeedyk, who has written a nice book [00:28:00] and has a lot of nice things to say about it and has some, some of his structures, which are not like mine, are absolutely beautiful, like a Zuni Bowl for instance.

But it’s not new technology. This is ancient stuff that we’ve forgotten about and we’ve maybe allowed new technology to to go past. You know, I think a lot of what our country did, you know, in the fifties, sixties and seventies, was so focused on efficiency that we forgot some of these smaller techniques.

You know, you’d go to eastern Montana and you’ll see a lot of partially washed out earthen dams in draws that were put in by the Soil Conservation Service, Thirties, Forties, Fifties, and you know, whether it was structural failure of drains or what caused the failures, the idea is not dissimilar. And the fact that my focus, especially on the steep ground [00:29:00] is permeable structures, that’s mostly for their survivability. And you know, it’s, we’ll go to a spot here in a minute. It was one of the first areas I did on this part of the ranch. And I often say that the best way to do this is with child labor. You know, my kids would mistakenly have friends over for the weekend and you know, if they wanted to play video games, they put in half a day stacking rocks and it’s very effective.

But you run out of child labor eventually, and then you have to figure out how you’re going to do it after that.

Thomas Plank: You also work with Montana Western, which is the university down in Dillon, and have students up here pretty regularly working on projects on your property, is that right?

Erik Kalsta: Well, we have a lot of educational things with Western and with Montana State as well, but when it comes to building weirs and stuff, typically Wild Rockies Field Institute, they come here a couple of [00:30:00] times a year and work on it.

Our goal is to work towards covering a lot more of this steep country with some grants. We want to prove it as a pilot. And so we’re talking to Montana Bureau of Mines, we’re talking to Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Wild Sheep Foundation and others, you know, because, for instance, with these very large elk herds, I would be willing to sacrifice some of my dry land production if we could create water sources up there in order to preserve some of my highly productive lowlands. But in truth, what we see here, and we’ll see that in our next site, is that when you look at these fields below me that are under pivot, you know, to get an extra five or 10% yield, we have to put in a lot more inputs.

The cost of inputs increases very [00:31:00] rapidly on those. Now, on this rangeland, which is, is dry and not terribly productive to be honest. We can make very small changes and see one, two, 300% increases in productivity and, and you know, I, I’ve got an old rancher over here who rides for me sometimes. I think he’s 86, and you know, I, I have this discussion with him and, you know, he says, “well, if, if I remember right, Erik, zero times a hundred is still zero.”

And, you know, I guess it remains to be seen who is right. And, and we’re, we’re trying to do some, some quantification of what we’re actually doing.

Thomas Plank: Well, there’s windmills to tilt at and yeah, zero times anything does still equal zero.

Erik Kalsta: So changing one part of the equation, you know, every time we change a part and we start seeing those soil changes, it [00:32:00] helps another part of the equation.

Thomas Plank: That’s what years and years now of, uh, positive impacts for this area because you’re slowing water down. So a lot of the ways it seems to slow water is to preemptively move soil or other kind of substrate. Is that right?

Erik Kalsta: Yep. You know, there’s a lot of ways to do it. I’ve put trees across a narrow part of the draw, or I’ve put anything that will trap that sediment, slow it down. When I’m using the rock weirs, we typically use ’em on the steeper country because a lot of it you can only get to on foot.

The materials are laying around on the ground and what you build is going to be permeable, and that permeability saves your structure and it still allows to drop out the sediment and the organic matter, and it slows things enough that [00:33:00] the impacts the cutting impacts of that high velocity water are mitigated.

Thomas Plank: But you’re also balancing that kind of change in the landscape with safety for your livestock, and then I guess for yourself as well if you’re out here.

Erik Kalsta: Sure. Yeah. I mean, and the, the main idea is to get the water to infiltrate. And, and my place is unusual in that, you know, my irrigation ditch kinda runs along the base of these foothills.

So everything that comes off. will be captured by that ditch eventually. So it’s not like a situation where they can say, oh, you’re taking somebody else’s water. It’s like, no, that’s part of my water, right, is, is the ability to capture there. But I’m trying to capture it before it gets to the ditch because A. That sediment becomes a problem in my ditch. But also I think the higher we capture it in the landscape, the longer it takes to move through the landscape. Most [00:34:00] of the focus we see and have seen for the last 20 years is on the sexy green riparian areas. That’s the terminus, that’s, that’s the end of where the water goes.

You know, we need to slow it down far above that to enhance and expand those riparian areas. But the focus is on, oh, what can we do down there? And that is, in my mind, a mistake. Getting that water into the soil earlier and helping a much broader swath of the ecosystem and still contributing in that riparian area, cooler higher water flows. And you know, these are tertiary gravels, so it’s easy to do that. Some areas the soils won’t work the same way, but here, that should be the focus.