Tanner Belknap with Star Valley Trout Unlimited spoke with SVI Media’s Dan Dockstader regarding the Rico Ditch Fish Passage and Stabilization Project on the Salt River near Etna.

(0:00) Standing beside the Salt River today in Star Valley with us (0:03) Tanner Belknap of Star Valley Trout Unlimited, reviewing one of his projects from (0:08) back in 2024, improving fish habitat, improving trout, improving the trout habitat in Star Valley. (0:16) Tanner, bring us up to date what we’re looking at now as we stand next to the river. (0:20) Yeah, so this project was focused on stabilizing outside banks.

Some of these banks in the high (0:27) flows of the spring of 2023 eroded more than 50 feet. When we were measuring erosion rates, (0:34) one of them was eroding more than five feet a day and we ended up having to put some emergency rock (0:40) in to stop it when it was about nine feet from taking out a major irrigation ditch. (0:48) So what are we calling this overall project and what do you look forward to seeing it do in the (0:53) coming years? It’s called the Rico, I’m trying to remember the exact name I used, (0:58) I think it’s called the Rico Ditch Fish Passage and Stabilization Project or (1:03) something along those lines.

That’s the formal part of it. Something like that. So here we are (1:07) in the Edna area and making this improvement.

You’ve got some cooperation too from the property (1:12) owners obviously. Yeah, so this project is on about, it’s on five landowners’ properties (1:18) and they all came together to get this accomplished. And we stabilized all the (1:24) outside banks by putting in about 20 foot long logs with the root wads sticking out into the (1:30) river and then back planting willows back behind them.

So those logs will provide long-term (1:36) stability and habitat and give those willows time to get established. And then the irrigation (1:42) diversion, before we came in and did the project it was about 100 yards further downstream (1:49) and it was a rubble push-up dam so the irrigators had to come in and do maintenance almost annually (1:57) with just putting debris in the river to back water up high enough to get it into their head (2:03) gate. So we moved the point of diversion upstream and now the diversion structure itself is just an (2:10) engineered reinforced riffle that maintains a high enough water level where the irrigators can (2:16) control flow just by adjusting the head gate.

And long term what do you foresee with this project? (2:21) Long term what I see is just the willows getting established, a lot better vegetation on the banks (2:28) and better trout habitat. And then just the irrigators not having to mess around with their (2:35) diversion anymore and just having much less maintenance to do. So we’ve got a good cooperative (2:39) project, irrigators, trout, people who own the land, everybody’s working together on this? Yeah, the goal (2:46) in all of our projects is that everyone ends better off than when we started.

So the landowners aren’t (2:51) losing their land anymore, irrigators are getting their water a lot easier and the fishing’s a lot (2:56) better throughout this project reach. Very good. Tanner Belknap, Star Valley Trout Unlimited.

Dan (3:05) Salt River in the Edna area.