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Salinas Dam Visit

CalPoly Architecture students and the SLO Beaver Brigade get a tour of the Salinas Dam, Jan 10, 2025 by Public Works Supervisor, Chris Summers.

On January 10, 2025 the San Luis Obispo Beaver Brigade joined CalPoly students of the College of Architecture, taught by Kelle Rene Brooks, to tour the Salinas Dam in Santa Margarita. Chris Summers, San Luis Obispo County Public Works, led the tour of the dam.

The Salinas Dam, San Luis Obispo County’s biggest concrete dam, was built in 1941, in a mere 6 months, by the War Department to supply water to Camp San Luis Obispo. Camp San Luis Obispo didn’t end up needing the water and soon after completion it became a water supply for the City of San Luis Obispo. Water from the reservoir is pumped through the Cuesta Tunnel (a one mile long tunnel through the mountains of the Cuesta Ridge) and then flows by gravity to the City’s Water Treatment Plant on Stenner Creek Road. The current theoretical capacity of the Salinas Dam is 26,000 acre feet. The City of San Luis Obispo has water rights to store up to 45,000 acre feet.

Of course, looking at this magnificent feat of construction ( it took only 6-months from ideation to completion to create a dam 135 feet high of rebar-free concrete, with the ability to add a steel spillway gate to almost double capacity of the dam! – definitely magnificent!) from the eyes of the beaver and it’s a little less impressive. The water “spilling” out of the dam is a powerful jet of water spewing out of a small pipe at least 20 feet above the river bed. It’s hard to imagine anything living passing from the reservoir to the river bed below the dam, or vice versa.

Salinas Dam releasing water through the dam, January 10, 2025.

Chris Summers led an impressive tour along the narrow walkway about midway up the side of the dam wall. We entered into the dam, walked up a spiral staircase until we arrived at the top of the dam. From there, the view of the valley downstream was stunning.

View of Salinas River from the Salinas Dam, Jan 10, 2025.

We could look out over the spillway, where C. Summers shared stories of water spilling over the dam. On January 9, 2023, he shared, the height of the water spilling over the dam was 11 1/2 feet! All of a sudden that height gauge at the side of the spillway became real.

Close up of 12 foot measuring marker on the side of the spillway

He said the sound of the water moving on January 9th became so eery. It had been raging for awhile, roaring down the canyon, and then, he said, it almost quieted down. What a wonder this dam could hold up under that much water!

The beavers weren’t so lucky.

We had checked on the beaver dams on Dec 29th 2022 and they looked great, January 1st, they were still holding up, January 7th, they were still holding up. But then January 9th, 2023 came and it was 10 days before we could even get close enough to the river to see the beaver dams. So we remembered very well January 9th when Chris Summers brought it up at the Salinas Dam tour.

It was interesting seeing the impressive dam through the eyes of the architecture students – some sketching the massive structure and landscape around it, others testing running up or down the spillway. Their assignment for their CalPoly class is to create a Salinas River Center that honors the landscape around it. There is an article about the last time this class was offered in the CalPoly Mustang News archives. It sheds some light on what the students are being asked to grapple with.

It’s almost simpler from the beavers perspective. At one point in time, all of this water was remaining in the Salinas River Watershed, rather than being exported out to an entirely different watershed. And then, almost overnight, the water was reduced and the passage way to the Upper Salinas was cut off. If only the SLO Beaver Brigade was around back in the 1940’s to have seen how the beavers, if there were any, reacted to this change in water flow.

Hear from our friends at Nature’s Engineers

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Hey Beaver Brigaders, this is Cooper Lienhart, fellow human beaver and former SLO Beaver Brigade education & outreach coordinator and restoration director. You may have been wondering why you haven’t heard from me in a while, and it’s because I have been busy starting a new, local Process-Based Restoration business called Nature’s Engineers. We are based here in San Luis Obispo County, and our goal is to serve the Central Coast. Our mission is to restore rivers and creeks by mimicking and supporting beavers, the original “nature’s engineers”. Keep reading to the end to hear about our first local project!

_{Cooper Lienhart, founder of Nature’s Engineers}

The vision behind this business is to bring healing to the Earth, and I have learned from the beavers that the best way to do that is to partner with water. Beavers, through their dam building, are able to slow and hold water, which creates lush wetland ecosystems. In the American West, it is more critical than ever that we hold water on our land. Since European colonization and the overhunting of beavers, the West has lost a staggering 80-90% of its wetland ecosystems, leaving us with a more arid, fire prone, and fragile landscape. Not only do wetlands allow water to slow, sink and recharge our freshwater supply, they also offer a myriad of other benefits for humans and wildlife such as fire resiliency, improved habitat for Steelhead Trout and other wildlife, better water quality, and storing carbon from the atmosphere.

If the Central Coast were full of beavers, as it once was, we would be in a better situation environmentally, and I wouldn’t be starting this business. But, we currently have too few beavers, and many of the creeks that used to be their habitat are now incised and degraded. So, it is up to us humans to support the local beavers as best we can and begin restoring their habitat so they can boost their population and return to the rivers and creeks where they are supposed to be.

_{The crew on our first BDA we ever built together. From left to right: Austin (Swift Water Design), Nick, Dom (SWD), Sara, Ayeen, Cooper, Charlie, Joe, Arturo. Monterey County, CA, Santa Lucia Conservancy.}

But how do we do it? Well, the same way the beavers would! We can mimic beavers by building human-made beaver dams called Beaver Dam Analogs (BDAs). These BDAs consist of all natural materials, such as local vegetation, soil and gravel, and untreated wooden posts, and are built using only hand tools and human labor. We also follow the beavers’ teachings on where the BDAs should be placed in the channel – looking for lower energy high points with sediment deposition, or areas where a side channel could be reactivated. Then, just like beavers, we build a whole series of dams and continue to go back for several years to maintain and build upon our structures over time.

Now, I know you are thinking “will the beavers take over the BDAs?” And the answer is hopefully yes! There have now been many cases across the West where beavers have taken over BDAs and extended them to a far greater length and height, creating vast ponds and truly putting our human work to shame. This is the best-case scenario, for the beavers work every night and have 5 million years of experience over us, and I don’t worry about the beavers taking our jobs, because there are plenty of other degraded creeks that need our help.

_{Beaver Dam Analog}

The goal of this restoration technique is to reintroduce the natural processes back into the ecosystem, so that we can more effectively utilize the energy of the system and allow it to build itself back to self-sustainability. This is why we call it Process Based Restoration (PBR). Our team has been training with another crew, Swift Water Design, who has been doing this work for over 6 years now, across the West from Monterey County, to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and even up into Oregon. We have assisted in building over 500 BDAs on over 10 stream-miles. We also have training with The Beaver Institute in implementing beaver coexistence devices, so if you have a beaver on your property that is causing flooding or chewing a favorite tree, we can help you implement a solution that allows the beavers to survive and your property to thrive.

_{Proud human-beavers showing off their completed BDA and head-cut erosion treatment near Bly, Oregon. From left to right: Cooper Lienhart, Arturo Guevara, Scott Brown}

Now, we have exciting news, because we are set to begin our first local project in SLO County this very month! We’re working with the City of San Luis Obispo on Johnson Ranch Open Space to build 30 BDAs on Dry Creek, which is a tributary to SLO Creek. There are active Steelhead Trout in the creek, so our goals are to improve the creek’s water holding capacity, and thus also improve the habitat for the Steelhead. Currently, much of the creek runs dry in the summer and fall, so we are eager to see if we can enhance the stream to continue flowing for longer into the year. This is part of a larger restoration project with the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash Tribe, performing hand-tended harvesting and seed sowing as well as low-intensity cultural burns with the aid of Cal Fire, SLO County Fire Dept and SLO City Fire. 300 Native trees will also be planted to enhance the riparian area. For more info on the project, you can read more here

I am hopeful that this will be the first of many PBR projects in our area. Nature’s Engineers is only the third PBR company in all of California and the only one located in the southern half of the state. I am incredibly thankful to the Beaver Brigade and my other mentors for supporting me in this dream to make a healthier, wetter, more resilient Central Coast. If you are interested in learning more, you can check out our website naturesengineers.com.

One stick at a time,

Cooper

Build Like A Beaver Workshop 2024

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Tucked away in Northern California’s Plumas National Forest along a series of creek systems and upland meadows a group of river restorationists, Biologists, Ecologists, regulators and passionate folks from all over the western USA came together to delve deeper into the art of Process Based Restoration. This workshop, titled Build Like A Beaver and hosted by the California PBR Network (CalPBR), aimed to share from among the top experts in the field of Process Based Restoration a look at the landscape from a watershed perspective, how to implement designs to achieve restoration goals including an understanding of different structure types and how implementation over time can achieve those goals.

Led by Karen Pope, USFS, Garrett Castello of Symbiotic Restoration, Kevin Swift of Swift Water Design, Brock Dolman and Kate Lundquist of Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC), and many others, we experienced degraded mountain meadows and the beginnings of rewetting remnant meadows along with the tricks and techniques used to slow the water down and spread it out on the landscape.

And it turns out, the beavers are the masters and originators of these techniques.

Taking inspiration from the beavers, we were guided in the process of:

Building structures called Post-Assisted Log Structures (PALS) to assist in wood accumulation and aggradation of sediment.
Selecting sites for restoration, sites that could effectively reactivate long-dormant stream channels, reestablish the connection between the stream and the floodplain, provide much needed sediment for downstream structures, places where aggradation could build up the streambank, and more.
Techniques that halt head-cuts, some as large as 12 feet deep, by simple methods involving only human physical & mental power and tools we can carry by hand.
Building structures similar to beaver dams, called Beaver Dam Analogs to slow the water down and create ponds.

And amongst all the learning and doing and building skills, an unnamed climate of collaboration was palpable. Creating a culture of support for the river, the land, the current & historic indigenous land stewards, the local economies and each other was more than spoken about, it was practiced. Local organic food was cooked and served to participants, tools were purchased at local hardware stores, local artists and designers were hired to create company t-shirts. Apparently, coming together to learn how to rebuild our riverscapes can also have the added benefits of rebuilding our rural communities. A win-win-win all around.

Education along the drive to camp (photo by Brock Dolman/OAEC)

Site of Swift Water Restoration Site (photo by Brock Dolman/OAEC)

Childs Meadow restoration site/ Symbiotic Restoration (photo by Brock Dolman/OAEC)

The SLO Beaver Brigade is excited to facilitate Process Based Restoration to re-wet our waterways, and regenerative economies, in SLO County. Stay tuned for upcoming project sites in our area.

April 12th 2025, 10am – 3pm

SLO Mission Plaza, 939 Chorro Street, San Luis Obispo, California

We offer three Sponsorship Levels

$1000 Keystone Level

$500 Beaver Believer Level

$100 Beaver Kit Level