Arizona Water Protection Fund helps with repairs on Oak Creek trails
The Arizona Water Protection Fund Commission, which annually provides funding for projects to restore, maintain, and enhance river and riparian resources throughout Arizona, selected a project sponsored in part by our sister agency, the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality in 2022.
It had a name that would ring a bell for most outdoor-loving Arizonans: “The Path to Protection at Oak Creek: Social Trail Rehabilitation for Watershed Health.”
The habitat was in serious need of restoration as a result of a common malady facing popular areas of our outdoors:
We just love it too much.
Anyone who has driven Highway 89A through Oak Creek Canyon has fallen for it. Everyone who has hiked along Oak Creek has been spellbound by its natural beauty. All those happy kids who have been swept downstream by the waters at Slide Rock have delighted in it.
Lots of drivers. Lots of hikers. Lots and lots and lots of happy kids. Lots of love. As a result, the area was in real need of repairs, including the ADEQ project, with resources provided by the Water Protection Fund, a program administered through ADWR.
It required a lot of repair.
The effort, which kicked off in 2020, was a joint project by ADEQ, Arizona Department of Transportation, Arizona State Parks & Trails, Conservation Legacy’s programs (Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps and Arizona Conservation Corps), Oak Creek Watershed Council, National Forest Foundation, Natural Channel Design, and the U.S. Forest Service USFS to rehabilitate unpermitted social trails leading to Oak Creek.
Social trails are informal trails that are not part of a trail network. In Oak Creek, a majority of the social trails stem from unauthorized parking areas along Highway 89A. The creekside habitat there is degraded by increasing numbers of visitors, who cause soil erosion and transport sediment and road pollutants along these trails and into Oak Creek.
“Social trails provide more and more access to the creek and more and more opportunities to pollute it,” said Carrie Henderson, executive director of Wilderness Volunteers, which handled some of the Oak Creek repairs with Conservation Legacy’s Arizona Conservation Corps and Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps. Henderson also observed that many of the social trail slopes leading down to the creek “are really super erosive and are a natural waterway for every time it rains.” When the heavy monsoon rains come, she said, “the water takes all the debris and the micro-trash from the road directly down to the creek, which is further contaminating it.”
The teams have created a variety of “visual cues” that help direct people hiking down to the creek toward the right pathways. They include erecting log fencing along some social pathways to “give a visual cue to people not to access” certain areas. Another is adding steps into some of the unstable, steep slopes down to the creek from the roadside.
Last fall, Wilderness Volunteers and Conservation Legacy crews constructed hundreds of feet of log barrier fencing, spread loads and loads of brush to close user-created trails, built a multitude of steps to maintain creek access for the public, and spread tens of yards of mulch to help capture pollutants from the highway before they get into the creek itself.
The award-winning program, which has been recognized on both the national and state level by the National Association of Environmental Professionals (2023) and Arizona Forward (2020-2021), will rehabilitate, close, and maintain 402 trails as part of the Arizona Water Protection Fund project. The implementation phase will be complete by May 14. ADEQ and Conservation Corps crews will work from May 7 to May 14 to reach the finish line.
Learn more at the ADEQ website.