New Movie Celebrates Salt River Restoration Efforts

Earlier this week, Trout Limitless launched a brand new movie, “Horses and Highwater: Restoring Tincup Creek,” documenting the restoration of the Salt River Watershed and the individuals who made this unimaginable mission come to life.

Positioned in northwest Wyoming and southeast Idaho, the Salt is a blue-ribbon fishery for native Snake River cutthroat trout and wild brown trout. Nevertheless, its well being has been compromised by degraded and fragmented fish habitat, speedy improvement in riparian areas, impaired water high quality, and dewatering.

“At its coronary heart, Horses and Highwater is a conservation movie, but it surely’s additionally about neighborhood, character, love for the land, and dogged Western willpower to discover a option to get issues finished,” mentioned Tanner Belknap, Salt River Undertaking Supervisor for Trout Limitless (TU). “The continuing restoration efforts at Tincup Creek exemplify the unimaginable partnership between Trout Limitless and Caribou-Targhee Nationwide Forest – amongst many different companions like Wyoming Conservation Corps crews, grazing permitees, and volunteers – to carry these tasks to life.”

Featured within the movie are two Tincup Creek stream restoration tasks, each of which aimed to reconnect sections of Tincup Creek to its floodplain. The movie focuses on the North Fork Tincup Creek Course of-Primarily based Restoration Undertaking, accomplished in 2024. This mission used groups of draft horses and Wyoming Conservation Corps crews to put in log constructions within the creek to seize cobble and sediment mobilized throughout runoff and lift the elevation of the streambed to enhance floodplain connectivity.

Elevating the stream will reconnect it to its floodplain to enhance stream perform, scale back erosion, and enhance habitat circumstances. These efforts will improve riparian circumstances and habitat for Yellowstone cutthroat trout, northern leatherside chub, boreal toad, western pearl shell mussels, and bluehead suckers – all of that are native species with particular administration emphasis. The movie additionally pays homage to the primary main TU and Caribou-Targhee Nationwide Forest restoration mission on Tincup Creek, accomplished in 2019, which totally restored 5 miles of Tincup alongside the filth highway part of the creek.