Trevor Seck surveyed the landscape near Pine, Arizona, a high country community of about 1,900 people. A few roads snaked through thickets of oak, juniper, and ponderosa, past a tangle of brush and skinny trees, and along slopes that rose to rimrock cliffs in the Tonto National Forest. It was green and beautiful and combustible, the kind of place that keeps foresters up at night.
“There’s a lot of fuel in here,” said Seck, Arizona’s forestry supervisor for the National Forest Foundation. A few minutes later we moved downslope to Pine Creek, a sleepy little stream that feeds the local and downstream watershed.
Photo by Q Martin
Water in Pine Creek on the Tonto National Forest.
After years of coordinating investments from a variety of partners, attaining access from private landowners, and lining up local contractors, crews can now begin to thin the overgrown forest and reduce the risk of unnatural wildfire.
The site is just one of 30-plus that’s currently overseen by the NFF’s Northern Arizona Forest Fund (NAFF), which has been shepherding the restoration of the state’s most crucial watersheds since 2015.
Mapping data from the Forest Service, Esri, and the U.S. Geological Survey, in partnership with the EPA and the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service, including the U.S. Department of Commerce, Census Bureau, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Ocean Service, and the National Geodetic Survey.
“Fire is not a problem for watersheds in and of itself,” said Kelly Mott Lacroix, a hydrologist with Tonto National Forest. The problem is big fires bake the soil, causing hillsides that once absorbed water like a sponge to work more like a concrete slide when the summer rains that follow fire season arrive. This can devastate small communities and muck up infrastructure downstream. In 2021, the Telegraph Fire that burned more than 180,000 acres on the Tonto led to significant post-fire flooding, damaging homes and infrastructure in the towns of Globe and Miami.
The Tonto ranges from ponderosa forests near Pine down to the Sonoran Desert hill country just outside of Phoenix. Its 2.9 million acres are home to three sprawling watersheds fed by the Salt, Verde, and Little Colorado rivers; a supply that millions of people rely on. What that means is a long to-do list. The Forest Service has a lot of resources, but not enough to restore every acre.
“The problem is too large to take on all at once,” said Mott Lacroix. The NFF helps navigate the resource needs, builds partnerships, puts boots on the ground, and raises funding.
The Forest Service has struggled for years to find ways to remove small trees while leaving the big, fire-resistant trees behind. The agency originally relied on profitgenerating logging contracts, said Sasha Stortz, the Southwest Region’s director for the NFF, but the need for a more holistic approach to restoration, in which forest thinning is just one component, requires a different model.
In turn, the team has focused on more targeted projects with big impacts, such as Pine Canyon.
Photo by Q Martin
Pine Creek feeds the local and downstream watershed.
“We’re able to complete projects that the Forest Service can’t do through the traditional contracting process,” Stortz said. It’s not cheap, but leaving all that fuel would probably cost more in the long run. “We pay now or we pay later,” Stortz said. “If there’s a post-fire flood it’s going to be a lot more expensive.”
Salt River Project (SRP), an Arizona water and power utility with several dams and canals on the Salt and Verde watersheds, partners with the NFF and contributes $500,000 a year to support forest restoration in the region. Caring for watersheds can improve long-term storage capacity, says Elvy Barton, the sustainability senior manager for SRP.
Post-fire floods carry a lot of mud and ash, and “all that material winds up in rivers and streams and our reservoirs,” she said. “If our reservoirs are filled with sediment it means we have less capacity to capture water.”
"If our reservoirs are filled with sediment [from post-fire flooding] it means we have less capacity to capture water.”
Elk browsed along the road and clouds built overhead as we made our way 20 miles south to the Highline Trail, a 60-mile route that crosses small creeks that tumble off of the Mogollon Rim and offers a variety of popular hikes for Phoenix residents. The trail once connected Rim country settlers, but homesteaders followed the path of least resistance when they built it.
This meant placing the route along streambeds and tributaries, which has led to erosion, trail degradation, and sediment flows into local waterways. The NFF is raising money and working with local contractors to reinforce or reroute the trail and shore up local springs.
Watershed health has drawn interest from a variety of groups that believe clean water matters: from Arizona breweries, which want clean water for their kettles, to the City of Phoenix, which provides water for 1.7 million urban residents who live miles from these high country forests yet depend on the watershed. Although Colorado River shortages have made headlines, Phoenix gets more than half of its water from the Salt and Verde River watersheds.
“A healthy watershed is a healthy drinking water supply,” said Cynthia Campbell, a water resources advisor for the City of Phoenix, which contributes $200,000 annually for Salt and Verde River watershed projects.
“A healthy watershed is a healthy drinking water supply.”
As the afternoon passed, the clouds spun away from Little Green Valley, a bright meadow 20 miles east along State Route 260. I walked with Shannon Smith, Tonto stewardship coordinator for the NFF, in a basin that lies upslope from a part of the meadow that was once a fen, a type of wetland that produces peat.
Photo by the NFF
The NFF is working to revitalize Little Green Valley Fen, which feeds an important tributary of the Salt River.
Photo by Q Martin
Lidar map of the area downstream from the Little Green Valley Fen on the Tonto National Forest.
The history of the basin and fen is not well documented, but it’s believed that road builders created the basin by digging and bootleggers burned the peat to make moonshine, diminishing its ability to store water. The fen’s Green Valley Creek, which feeds Tonto Creek, a major tributary of the Salt, does not flow as well as it once did.
Most of the land in the area is managed by the Forest Service, and maps frequently mark the boundary with a green line, said Mott Lacroix. The rest belongs to a rancher. The agency will soon fill in the basin and repair the meadow ecosystem to help increase flows to the creek. Now that the NFF has brought the rancher on board, work could begin within the year. “Watersheds don’t care about ownership,” said Mott Lacroix. “You have to be able to go beyond the green line.”
The next time you’re visiting the Tonto, hike the Highline Trail. The route winds through 60 miles of vistas, creeks, and pine forests across the Mogollon Rim. The section between the Washington Park and Pine trailheads has been restored by the NFF and its community partners. Keep an eye out for signs of trail health, marked by little erosion, good drainage, and cleared vegetation.
About the Author
Phoenix-based Ron Dungan is a reporter for KJZZ, a public radio affiliate, and has been a staff reporter at The Arizona Republic. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Gray’s Sporting Journal, and USA Today, among others.
Cover photo of NFF’s Trevor Seck and Shannon Smith viewing a zuni bowl, a rock structure meant to control the flow of water and prevent erosion, on the Tonto National Forest. Photo by Q Martin.
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