Conceptual design work is underway for a river restoration project that municipal and wildlife officials hope will clean up a mess from gravel mining from past decades.

Where Walton Creek meets the Yampa River, gravel mining operations that began in 1968 left behind an ecosystem tangle of nonnatural backwater ponds, gravel deposits, artificially raised banks, side channels, and unfortunately, slow moving water that provides perfect spring spawning areas for nonnative northern pike.

“When they built the gravel pits there, they rerouted Walton Creek and changed where Walton Creek came in,” Steamboat Springs Water Resources Manager Julie Baxter said in an overview of the proposed project during the Upper Yampa State of the River event earlier this month.

---

---

The design work for the Yampa River and Walton Creek Confluence Restoration, which is located primarily on city land, is funded by the city and Colorado Parks & Wildfire with the hope of addressing multiple river ecosystem problems. The goal is to develop a final design for a multi-objective river and wetland restoration that encompasses stream channel, floodplain and riparian improvements.

“This has been a goal for many years to address all these issues at Walton Creek confluence,” said Bill Atkinson, longtime CPW aquatic biologist in Steamboat. “The way the river has been altered through this reach, it’s no longer functioning properly.”

---

---

Atkinson said the redirected river waters and gravel pits create slow, wide and warm areas that do not pass sediment naturally. That section of river forms point bars, upstream bank erosion and a significant breeding ground for northern pike where the fish eggs adhere to submerged vegetation. The pike are not native to the river and are voracious feeders of everything from invertebrates to trout.

“It’s an area of high concern from a standpoint of northern pike recruitment to the river,” Atkinson said.

Baxter outlined 10 objectives for the project: reduce northern pike spawning habitat, improve proper river function, preserve and restore flood plain connectivity and enhance flood protection, improve stream temperature, enhance biodiversity, increase wetland habitat, preserve and improve recreational access to the river, protect infrastructure from future channel migration, facilitate and protect water diversion for snowmaking, and minimize anticipated ongoing costs of channel maintenance.

The restoration would eliminate and fill in the manmade backwater areas and return the river to a well-functioning channel, according to Atkinson. The work would lower the river banks to natural levels to better connect with adjacent riparian and wetlands areas during spring flooding.

The proposed project would be extensive and expensive.

“This area has really been altered from historic conditions,” Baxter said. “In the next couple of years, we will move into the design-build phase.”

“The complex river and wetland systems located on the Yampa River and Walton Creek confluence property and the adjacent Williams Preserve present a unique opportunity for large-scale protection and ecological restoration.”

Steamboat Springs restoration plan

The current planning involves four consultant groups, including Stillwater Sciences, working toward a design that should be 60% complete by June. The project partners include nine agencies, nonprofit groups and Steamboat Resort, which owns a 16 cubic feet per second water right for snowmaking on the Yampa River with a pumphouse near River Creek Park.

“Ski corp has to, every couple of years, go in and dredge out sediment,” Atkinson said, especially since the resort draws water for snowmaking in the fall when the Yampa River is low.

The aquatic biologist said nonnative northern pike are problematic throughout the Yampa River watershed. The sport fish were intentionally introduced in the late 1970s into Elkhead Reservoir, which now utilizes a 600-foot net to try to keep the fish in the reservoir when the spillway operates. According to Atkinson, northern pike were illegally introduced into Stagecoach Reservoir in the early 1990s by individuals employing “bucket biology.”

CPW has no size or possession limits on the invasive pike, and fisherman are encouraged to keep or donate the fish. For example, the marina at Stagecoach Reservoir has a pike donation bin.

“Harvest is encouraged to benefit native species as well as the popular trout resources of the Yampa Basin,” Atkinson said.

Northern pike in Lake Catamount has been a problem for years because the fish can escape across the spillway. CPW has worked since 2007 to net and manage northern pike at Catamount.

The Walton Creek confluence project has been considered for almost a decade. In 2015, CPW and the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program commissioned a feasibility study for reconstruction of the area, but the proposed options did not gain consensus among the stakeholders engaged at the time, according to a city project history. In late 2020, the city convened a different and expanded stakeholder advisory group to evaluate options, which led to a preliminary design plan in 2022 and to the current conceptual design work.

The consultant team will identify and analyze potential treatment recommendations that balance disconnecting northern pike spawning habitat and furthering multi-benefit restoration objectives. The work requires hydrologic, hydraulic, sediment transport and habitat suitability analyses of proposed conditions compared to existing conditions, according to city plans.