Reconnection + Renewal

An oxbow restoration on a tribally held easement on a working Sycan River ranch is a glimpse into a brighter future in the Klamath Basin.

"People wanted to be able to develop and farm and ranch and use the land as much as possible. When you do that, you start levying everything off so it doesn’t flood—you don’t want your crops or your house to get flooded. But because of that, water’s got nowhere to go. It can’t get out and flood the landscape like it should. If you want that functionality back, the only way to do that is to undo some of that previous work." -Brian Marker, Ducks Unlimited

Out of the southern Oregon rims and mountains that divide the Great Basin from drainages that flow to the Pacific Ocean, the Sycan River carries its water into the Sprague River, and ultimately the Klamath River.

Along its winding way from its headwaters in the Sycan Marsh, the river fills with snowmelt that sustains fish like redband trout and suckers. In the spring, the Sycan floods the wetlands and wet meadows that line its banks.

This watershed is a part of the  Southern Oregon Northeastern California (SONEC) region , an area that provides a rich mosaic of wetlands, wet meadows, and irrigated pastures that make up critical migration and breeding habitat for millions of birds in the Pacific Flyway each year.

The people of the Klamath Tribes have called this watershed home for millennia. The Sycan River was included in their former (1864) reservation boundary—only part of the connected landscape the Tribes once stewarded. Despite a smaller reservation footprint, the Tribes are heavily invested in the watershed to this day.

Traditionally, the Tribes harvested sucker fish from the waters of the Klamath Basin. Suckers are of utmost cultural importance to the Tribes. Today, two of the four species of sucker fish in this area are now endangered.

Zoom out on the map to see the larger Klamath Basin and SONEC landscapes.

The floodplains and wet meadows found in this region are also one of the reasons people were drawn to the Sycan's fertile banks to ranch and farm.*

By the mid-twentieth century, federal agencies built dykes and levees to keep rivers like the Sycan within their banks. Although these structures kept fields, houses, and communities from flooding during high-water events, they disconnected these rivers from their floodplains. Seasonal flood irrigation became the only thing keeping the wet meadows in those floodplains from drying.

*Much of this watershed was held in allotments by members of the Klamath Tribes after the Dawes Act of 1887. Some native families have held onto their allotments to this day, but many more families were bought out by the settlers who flocked to the area in the early twentieth century.

In 2013, the state of Oregon’s adjudication process recognized the Klamath Tribes as the senior water right holders within their historic reservation boundary. Lingering and persistent drought have led the Tribes to make continued calls on the river's water, in hopes of maintaining in-stream flows and habitat for the endangered suckers and other endemic species.

For the farmers and ranchers who depended on water from the Sycan and Sprague for irrigation, these calls are a huge blow—especially as the drought makes growing conditions tougher.

The alternative to irrigating with surface water from rivers and streams—pumping groundwater—has yet to be regulated and the effects on the aquifer above Upper Klamath Lake are concerning, although unknown. As a result, those unable to draw water from the river face difficult decisions about their land and livelihoods.

Becky and Taylor Hyde acquired the Yainix Ranch on the Sycan River outside of Beatty, Oregon, in 2001. The Hydes both come from long lineages of central Oregon ranchers, and each has a lifetime of experience managing their families' ranches around the region.

When they purchased the Yainix Ranch, the Hydes recognized the incised and downcut channel of the Sycan River running through the property as a symptom of larger issues within the watershed.

The Hydes knew they wanted to do something about the river, to restore productivity and bring some life back to this stretch of the Sycan River.

“As a family and as a ranch, we are deeply interested in continuing to bring these lands back to better health,” Becky Hyde said. “It’s just an ethic that we come with.”

In 2006, the Hydes entered the Yainix Ranch into a conservation easement with the Klamath Tribes. It was the first tribally-held private land easement in the country.

The easement opened the door for projects that could be mutually beneficial for both the Hydes and the Tribes—ones that could bring some life back to the river and to the ranch.

Recently, the Hydes zeroed in on one project in particular: an old oxbow on one of the ranch's riverfront pastures. The oxbow had been cut off from the river by levees at some point before the Hydes took over, and had been converted into an irrigation pond. Water was pumped from the river into the pond, where it could be used to water the pasture in the drier parts of the season.

But after the water calls and drought regulations, Hyde said, there wasn’t enough water to keep the pond full, and the pastures went unirrigated. Without water, the pastures dried out and ceased to produce forage for livestock.

Birds that had used the wet meadows and the pond dwindled, too.

The Hydes and the Tribes, who were already doing vegetation, groundwater, and water quality monitoring on the Yainix Ranch because of the easement, connected with biologists with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Partners for Fish and Wildlife program, as well as Ducks Unlimited and the Intermountain West Joint Venture (IWJV) to see how they could return water to the dry pasture.

After a couple of years of consultation with both the Hydes and the Tribes, the Sycan Oxbow project broke ground in 2021.

The project itself was simple, said Ducks Unlimited engineer Brian Marker.

"We just undid what had been done," he said.

Contractors took out the dirt levees that kept the river from flooding into the oxbow and removed water control structures. They also dug out a couple of ponds along the oxbow to hold water after a flooding event.

Tyler Hammersmith, the project lead for the Klamath Falls Partners for Fish and Wildlife program, said that breaching the levees means the river will be able to fill the oxbow during high water events, maybe every three or four years or so. When flood waters enter the oxbow, they'll slow down and spread out, seeping slowly into the ground.

Flooding would replenish the off-channel wetlands in the pasture, providing habitat for waterbirds and fish. The Hydes hope that it will also result in more plentiful forage that stays green for longer into the summer.

Sediment carried in each flood will be trapped in the oxbow and also be deposited across the floodplain in the pasture, which Hammersmith said is a boon for water quality throughout the watershed.

“That’s the goal, is to get the sediments out of the river and keep them from going downstream and into Upper Klamath Lake,” Hammersmith said. “The sediments are rich in nutrients and you want that in the floodplain, not rushing downstream.”

Video: Active groundwater infiltration during spring 2023 flooding on the Yainix Ranch.

Mark Buettner, the environmental scientist with the Klamath Tribes who has worked closely with the Hydes on the Yainix easement, said that a simple floodplain reconnection like the oxbow project goes a long way in restoring river function.

"Projects like these are trying to restore that overall function of the system by reconnecting the floodplain and getting back some of that historic complexity and function of the river, putting the meanders back in and getting the diverse habitats for a wide variety of wildlife," he said.

High waters in the spring of 2023 put the partners' work to the test.

It passed—with flying colors.

Although it's still too soon for the partners to see the effects of the flooding in their monitoring data, Hammersmith predicts an increase in floodplain vegetation this year, despite the area's short growing season. The real benefits of the work, he said, will likely take several years to appear.

But, he said, he's already seen an uptick in both plants and wildlife on the oxbow.

Photo: A piezometer measures groundwater along the Sycan River as it flows through the Yainix Ranch.

“The whole field was flooded and there were sandhill cranes, egrets, ducks flying around—all these birds were using that habitat," Hammersmith said. "We used to maybe see a flock of geese here or there, but nothing like this.”

And for the Hydes, it's a small step to make this piece of pasture more productive for the cattle they’re raising on the Yainix Ranch. It won't solve all of their problems by any means, Hyde said, but it's a step in the right direction—one that she hopes can be part of a suite of tools that help keep families on the land and rebuild relationships with the Klamath Tribes.

“Some ranches on the Sprague system could really increase their forage despite the water calls by removing dykes and levees to let the river reconnect to its floodplain,” Hyde said.

One of the project's key goals is to be a pilot for the rest of the watershed, showing that conservation can go hand-in-hand with economic sustainability and perhaps encouraging other landowners to do similar work.

“As neighbors we are always looking to one another for good ideas that may improve our operations,” Hyde said. “I hope that this is one piece of the puzzle that might help the neighborhood a bit, and I hope we continue to build trust in this partnership so it can help others.”

According to Buettner, establishing trust in the partnership is critical. Animosity toward the Tribes, fueled by the water rights adjudication, still reigns supreme in the community, and that can be hard to overcome.

But Buettner, Hyde, and the rest of the partners are hopeful that the oxbow restoration shines a light on a cooperative path forward.

“With the recent water rights adjudication and the negative impacts to the ranchers in the area, we understand the lack of desire to cooperate on the restoration,” Buettner said. “We’re trying to demonstrate that they can still have viable ranching operations by supporting restoration and getting this river behaving like it did historically.”

Hyde said that the attitude of the partners she engaged with on this work was the key to success. She said that Ed Contreras, the IWJV's SONEC Conservation Delivery Coordinator, approached her with a desire to know how the partners could balance the restoration with her family's need to make a living—he listened and connected her with the right people to take action.

“People are tired and will slam the gate in your face if they think you're the enemy and think that the only reason you're there is to displace them,” she said. “You have to come in with an open mind and a listening ear.”

That—and the understanding that renewal takes time, and sometimes reconnection happens project by project.

“Whenever you get these opportunities you try to take advantage of them because you don’t get them as often as you like,” Marker said. “You try to make the biggest difference for wildlife and the floodplain and the landowners as you can by just doing what you can when you can.”

Little by little, the Sycan's water returns.

Drone footage and arial images courtesy of Will Natividad, Imagine Mapz LLC.

All other photos/videos courtesy Tyler Hammersmith, Ed Contreras, and Emily Downing.

Reconnection + Renewal

Intermountain West Joint Venture