Your property is blessed with an abundance of beautiful boulders and rock. Using it to your advantage is peak permaculture.

I have been fascinated with stream/waterway restoration my entire life.  What captures and holds my attention is the ongoing demonstration of so any natural systems that us humans can organize and support into a collaborative effort (restoration) or destructive processes (...pave paradise, put up a parking lot.)  You're making great progress, observing, reading the sediment and  identifying where one man's energy can have maximum impact.  
Keep up the wonderful effort and thank you for sharing your journey 👍🌻

It’ll be interesting to see what the wash will look like in 10 years!

I bet the desert willow would love to help you bind that sediment you've collected, looks like ideal habitat and if you do the planting yourself  you can make lines of them that will catch debris and slow the flow even further while also building natural resilience so that the sediment doesn't wash away from a 1000 year storm.

If you make some air prune beds you can have hundreds of seedlings to just recolonise that creek.

I remember when you were conflicted..... about the check dams lol

having a low spot in the middle of the dam is actually the most important thing. the moment you "plug it up" the water will run AROUND the dam, eroding it from the sides and the dam will fail. It is good as it is!

3:43 Look at the amazing amount of sand you have captured in this one check dam alone.  A few strategically placed stones and you'll likely capture several more tons with the next rain.  The ultimate goal is to fill the incised creek bed with sediment so the creek bed is just a bit lower than the creek banks.  That's when you will achieve MAJOR spreading of the wash water.
4:35 You would be well served if you had a long steel bar to use as a lever and a winch or come-along and a sling in your wash walk kit so you can move some serious big rocks too.
10:04 is a great illustration of where water and sediment is already flowing over the creek banks and onto the adjacent riparian zone.  Massive quantities of water over the bank and across the land. This is the ultimate win.
17:00 As your smaller rocks (cobble) get buried in sediment, they become hardened against the erosive force of fast flowing water.  I think of this development as nature cementing or unitizing the structure for durability in extreme conditions.  So don't be discouraged.  You are making great progress.

That's awesome that your neighbor and his neighbor find this cool too.

Water bunds - or as we also like to call them: "earth smiles" - are semi-circular shaped pits that capture rainwater.

I L❤ve Monsoon Season 👀⛈🌦 ,, 🕺🏽⛈🌦💃🏽🎼🎶👍🏾

Has to be so encouraging to see the green expanding and lasting longer

Placing some of those big rocks under native trees might be a great idea too!

I work for a Dirt Work company so we’ve pretty much prep land for buildings and we make retention ponds. I work on a skid steer sometimes and sometimes they have to pick up rocks and dump them somewhere and I always do this in dry Creek beds. I come back later and it’s usually filled up with silt with a whole bunch of big plants around it.

Create a slight dip in the middle so the water doesn't erode the sides of the check dam. And don't forget the splash guard downstream so that the water doesn't erode the downstream bed.😊

I like that boulder. That is a NICE boulder.

You have so much nice stones. They are a great resource for walls and foundations. Where there are no trees, make the check dams higher but they have to slope so the water pressure do not break them.

I wonder if you ever talk with Shaun Overton at Dustups Ranch.

The water is like a compounding interest on the land.

At each place you have a check dam, you also need to shoot a level line out across the hill  and make a swale so that when  that check dam is holding back a pool, that pool stretches out to 300 feet wide or more, all the way across from property line to property line if you can.   Start with the highest point of that wash on your property.  That much less sediment moving to fill up your check dams, because once completely full of sediment, it no longer does much of anything for you beyond maybe 25% by volume of sediment pore space to hold water.   Better to focus whatever time you can afford to spend on it on completing one swale all the way across,  then go down the wash say 3 feet of elevation to do the same thing all over again with whatever overflows that first completely filled, border to border swale.

A Prime seasonal stream for BDA's.