In 2007, a veterinarian who had spent his whole career on dogs and cats bought 140,000 acres of high desert in eastern Oregon and started filling a dry ditch with rock. Not a river. A ditch cut six feet down into the floor of a valley, dry 11 months a year, empty of fish since before anyone alive could remember. He hauled in rock, gravel, and juniper logs and stacked them into low piles that leaked. A hundred of them, strung along three and a half miles of a creek called Camp Creek.

It looked almost too simple to work. But those leaking piles were designed to do something the dry channel had forgotten how to do—slow the water down, spread it across the landscape, and give the creek a chance to come back.

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