
Badger Creek
Restoration Project
OUR VISION
The Badger Creek Watershed Partnership works collaboratively to restore and steward Badger Creek and its tributaries to create a healthy riparian area and deliver a steady stream of clean water to downstream users.

About the
Badger Creek Restoration Project
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Where: The Badger Creek Watershed is located east of Salida in southern Park County and western Fremont County.
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What: In 2016, the Badger Creek Watershed Partnership was formed to address natural resource challenges in the Badger Creek Watershed. Federal, state, and local natural resource managers work alongside multi-generational landowners, local ecologists and non-profits to improve land health and increase productivity in the watershed. Central Colorado Conservancy began coordinating the Badger Creek Partnership in 2017 and has maintained a watershed-wide stakeholder partnership aimed at the assessment, improvement, restoration, and protection of all aspects of the Badger Creek Watershed.
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Why: Badger Creek is one of the most important trout spawning streams between Salida and Canon City. It is also an important water source for wildlife, agriculture, ranching, and the local community.
History of the Badger Creek Project
While today's landowners and land managers are working to implement grazing strategies that improve land health, parts of the watershed still have not recovered from the historic impacts of overgrazing. Areas with compacted soils, bare ground, and scant vegetation result in poor infiltration, and when exposed to heavy rainstorms the watershed has seen significant erosion, gullying, and flash flooding.
Badger Creek normally flows at a modest 1-4 cubic feet per second, but during rainstorms it can swell to many times its size carrying large amounts of sediment into the Arkansas River. Over time these unchecked floodwaters have scoured the creek bed, cutting a trench 4-12 feet deep and up to 200 feet wide, leaving former wetland surfaces high and dry. An estimated 64% of the watershed’s wetlands have been lost due to this process of channel incision and downcutting.
Over the last 8 years, we have honed in on the goal of turning this watershed into a water catchment. Rather than water and sediment flowing quickly out of the headwaters during rainstorms, we are

focused on enhancing the function of Badger Creek and its tributaries to act as a filter for upland erosion, restoring it back to a sponge that can attenuate floodwaters and capture sediment so that the headwaters deliver a steady stream of clean water to downstream users. As this natural healthy headwaters process is restored there is an increase in wetland vegetation, riparian aquifers are replenished, and habitat for wildlife is enhanced.

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Badger Creek Restoration Timeline
The Badger Creek Watershed Partnership was formed in 2016 to address natural resource challenges in the Badger Creek Watershed. Landowners, federal, state, and local natural resource management agencies, ecologists, and non-profits joined forces to work collaboratively to improve watershed health on Badger Creek and it tributaries.
Beginning in 2017, local stream experts from EcoMetrics studied the Badger Creek Watershed from top to bottom and worked alongside stakeholders to design a custom approach to restore Badger Creek and its tributaries. Out of this extensive process came the Badger Creek Watershed Assessment.
In 2018, Central Colorado Conservancy secured grants from Colorado Healthy Rivers and Colorado Parks and Wildlife Wetlands Program to implement two riparian restoration demonstration projects on BLM properties along Badger Creek, where carefully managed grazing was already in place. At the same time, the U.S. Forest Service funded a wetland protection project in Cal’s Fork, one of the tributaries to Badger Creek. Our agency partners were the early adopters, hosting demonstration projects that would provide an invaluable opportunity to showcase the effectiveness of these simple process-based restoration techniques.
Over the summers of 2019 and 2020, two reaches of Badger Creek were treated, building a total of 190 speed bumps over 1.4 miles of Badger. These riverscapes responded with expanding green riparian areas. The groundwater table appeared to rise, and we saw wetlands begin to form off the main channel. As a whole these treatments reconnected and protected over 40 acres of riparian habitat, nearly half of which are wetlands. Following the restoration treatments we planted 5000 willows in the newly re-connected floodplain.
With successful projects on the ground demonstrating the effectiveness of these treatments, additional landowners and land managers took an interest in implementing restoration projects on their own properties. In 2021, we received a grant from Restore Colorado, a partnership among the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and Great Outdoors Colorado, the Gates Family Foundation, the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, Colorado Parks and Wildlife, and the Colorado Water Conservation Board. We also received a second grant from the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Wetlands Program. Together these grants would allow us to expand this work to the watershed scale.
To better manage grazing in the uplands we installed 1.6 miles of wildlife friendly fencing which allowed a State Land Board pasture some rest during the grazing season for the first time in a generation. We treated an additional 2.7 miles of Badger Creek, this time on both public and private lands. An additional 375 speed bumps were built, reconnecting over 36 acres of riparian habitat and restoring more than 20 acres of wetlands. We also planted 6,160 more willows.
With recovery now underway on more than 4 miles of Badger Creek, we set our sights on repairing more than 5 miles of Badger Creek’s tributaries on both public and private lands. EcoMetrics expanded their team and spent 6 full weeks in the watershed building over 1000 speed bumps reconnecting more than 125 acres of riparian habitat including 75 acres of wetlands. We planted 2900 additional willows and established two new off-channel water points in the watershed which will allow for better distribution of cattle and wildlife, encouraging better utilization of upland pastures and allowing riparian areas some key rest during the growing season.
To date, we have treated over 10 miles of Badger Creek and its tributaries with slow and spread structures which have reconnected 218 acres of riparian habitat, of which 124 acres are wetlands. We have planted over 16,000 willows that will jump-start the creek’s ability to filter upland erosion. Over time, this process-based restoration will continue to improve the function of the headwaters to slow down flash floods, capture sediment and clean the water for downstream users in the largest river basin in Colorado.
For a deeper dive into the Badger Creek Restoration Project, please visit the Story Map here.

Next Steps
for the Badger
Creek Watershed
With the bulk of the stream restoration work completed, the Conservancy will be coordinating hydrological and vegetation monitoring in 2025 and beyond.