KAIBAB NATIONAL FOREST — A wildfire that grabbed national media attention when it destroyed the historic Grand Canyon Lodge last year also torched a lesser-visited but equally rare northern Arizona treasure: a spring-fed stream that flows year-round and one that is now a top priority for restoration.
The Dragon Bravo Fire burned most of the spruce and fir trees and blackened soils on the hillsides cradling North Canyon and its namesake creek, one of only two perennial streams on the vast Kaibab Plateau. With monsoon rains washing loose soil downhill and toward the Colorado River, restoration crews are working to trap the dirt where it can help regenerate the forest and keep the biologically rich streamside meadows from eroding away.
Kaibab National Forest hydrologist Reba McCracken directed two small crews of restoration workers in July as they felled blackened trees and arranged them along the wash upstream of the springs in an effort to slow the erosion.
"These trees would probably do this naturally after a few years," she said over the buzz of chainsaws. The workers were giving the canyon a head start on trapping ash and dirt that is better kept where it can maintain spongy meadows that hold water and support tree regrowth, rather than choking the stream and vanishing into Grand Canyon and beyond to the mud beneath Lake Mead.
It's work she had hoped wouldn't be needed when Dragon Bravo raced across Grand Canyon's North Rim and cooked this watershed just north of the national park's North Rim entrance and east of the Kaibab Lodge.
Lightning ignited the fire on July 4, 2025. The National Park Service initially managed it under a "confine/contain" strategy that could provide some ecological benefits, but shifting winds ultimately drove it toward the lodge on Grand Canyon's North Rim and along the nearby plateau points and descending drainages like North Canyon.
Dragon Bravo lasted months and burned some 150,000 acres, roughly split between the national park and the national forest. Later assessments found that most of the soils throughout the fire's footprint burned at low or moderate severity, but not around North Canyon.
Until Dragon Bravo, McCracken had focused on restoring the North Kaibab's only other perennial stream, a larger Colorado River tributary that had endured its own wildfire in 2020.
"I had been really focused on Kanab Creek, and then this burned and I was like, 'Oh no! Our other gem!" McCracken said. She shifted her attention and enlisted help, first from the Grand Canyon Trust and a team of volunteers from the Arizona Mountaineering Club, and then by using Forest Service and philanthropic funds to hire crews from Arizona and New Mexico for this outing.
One measure of North Canyon's uniqueness in the region is the fact that, before Dragon Bravo, the stream held the only population of Apache trout north of Grand Canyon. The formerly endangered trout, Arizona's state fish, occurs primarily in the White Mountains, but the state moved some there in the 20th century, perhaps to protect it from hybridization with non-native rainbow trout, as the creek's water sinks underground before reaching the Colorado, providing a natural barrier against invaders.
Neither the state nor the Forest Service has been able to find any of the trout in the stream since the fire passed through. Should Arizona decide to restock the stream, the waterway will need rehabilitation, including the buffer of spongy meadows above.
The springs also support a stonefly species found nowhere else, McCracken said. Researchers have spotted surviving stoneflies there this summer.
North Canyon remains a stunning landscape even if — or in some ways because — its slopes burned at high severity relative to most of the flatter forests that Dragon Bravo swept.
This summer, patches of bright magenta fireweed punctuate the blackened soils between dead trees. Knee- and waist-high aspens have emerged from the former shadows of towering conifers. A band of grasses with a sprinkling of blue lupines and orange paintbrush remains where moisture in the spongy meadows slowed and blocked the flames. It's a feature that McCracken hopes to retain to protect against future fires after the forest comes back.
Part of the Arizona Trail, which runs from the Utah state line to the U.S.-Mexico border, passes through the watershed where McCracken's team worked, just above the canyon with the springs and perennial flows. Other recreation includes hunting for deer and turkeys, and bison sometimes use the meadows. About two-thirds of that watershed's soils experienced moderate- to high-severity burning during Dragon Bravo. If left unchecked, much of that soil could wash away, and the chance for restoring those resources would diminish with it.
Slowing erosion protects water quality locally and in the Colorado, she said. Although the stream ultimately sinks into the ground before re-emerging as springs, a flood during the month after the fire poured ash and mud across the dryland stretch and created a plume in the river.
Erosion control also keeps rainstorms from carving the canyon to bedrock and leaving a scar that would prevent the forest's resurgence.
"We're in a pretty dry environment," McCracken said. "It takes these sediments a while to form and they're pretty thin."
One five-member crew of Hopi workers who cut trees and built rock and log structures on the project in July represented Ancestral Lands, a conservation corps providing job opportunities for Indigenous youths, young adults and recent veterans. It was a return trip to the Kaibab Plateau for 21-year-old Maques Lee, who had worked on fencing meadows to protect them from grazing damage last year before evacuating when Dragon Bravo erupted.
"It's great to come back here and be part of the post-fire work," Lee said. He was also in training to be a fire crew lead, meaning he could have a hand in keeping the region's next big fire from reaching sensitive places.
Protecting this environment carries special meaning for Hopis, one of several tribes who consider Grand Canyon a sacred area.
"Our culture has significant ties to this place, not only (here on) the top but down below," Lee said. "It's great to be a part of that. It's good to be here and reconnect with nature."
Anna De St. Aubin led another small crew, from a nonprofit New Mexico restoration team called Rio Grande Return, during the July stint with McCracken. Where a storm had started eroding the channel on the upstream end of a stock pond, the crew placed logs to trap sediment. On the pond's downstream side, where a cascade had formed and blasted out a shoulder-deep hole, they piled in logs to fill and fortify the outlet against the next storm.
"Hopefully we can catch it before it gets really channelized and degraded," she said. When monsoon storms get rolling, "It's like a firehose."
De St. Aubin had witnessed it firsthand days earlier, after arriving at camp for the assignment. A thunderstorm's downpour create a flood that moved dirt, ash and sticks through the canyon.
She was on her second season in this type of restoration, and said it's satisfying to help give nature a hand.
"A lot of fire is a human impact," she said. "It slows that down and creates a more natural environment ultimately where you can have more riparian areas and beautiful spaces to be in."
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Earlier in the season, Grand Canyon Trust organized a work trip to North Canyon with about a dozen volunteers from the Arizona Mountaineering Club. They arranged rocks into bowls and small dams to slow and spread water and sediments, projects that the Trust's Arizona public lands director, Cerissa Hoglander, called "stitches on an injury, temporarily holding things together while the landscape heals."
The watershed and its springs are vital to the ecosystem, she said, supporting up to 10 times as many species as adjacent uplands. "Springs and wetlands and even creeks are pretty rare in northern Arizona."
A rapid response was needed to prevent a blowout. "We can get these really flashy, kind of intense flows," Hoglander said. "North Canyon in particular is really sensitive, because the area up there is one of the highest-severity burn patches in the Dragon Bravo Fire."
Even an intensive restoration effort may prove insufficient if the right storm hits, McCracken said. That's one reason the Forest Service is focusing on these low-tech projects instead of using bulldozers or some other, more mechanized response.
"If we get mega-storms, there's nothing we can do," McCracken said.
If all goes well, the sprouting aspens should mature into a healthy-looking forest over the next couple of decades, according to McCracken's colleague Andrew Stevenson, the Kaibab National Forest's silviculturist. Nursing the canyon's next spruces and firs to the size of those that burned last year will take two or three centuries, he said.
That's all the more reason to retain the soils that can hold water and support those trees, Stevenson said. A wet, mixed-conifer forest like what existed there before is rare for a high plateau in a region dominated by ponderosa pines. The Forest Service will replant some of those trees to augment natural regeneration, he said, but likely only on north-facing slopes where shade gives them the best chance to weather the region's warming and drying climate.
"It's very possible that the size and the footprint of the wet mixed conifer will shrink over time," Stevenson said. A dry mix would burn more frequently, as would a pure ponderosa stand more common in the region. But he said he's confident some spruce will reassert themselves if the soils remain in place.
It's unclear how much the restoration is costing, McCracken said, as it pulls from various sources within the Kaibab's existing budget and from new grants, such as from the National Forest Foundation. With adequate funding, she hopes to continue bringing conservation corps to assist for several years. "I'm barking up every tree I can find," she said.
One of the New Mexico crew members on the job in July said it was a privilege to be working to restore the Kaibab, and an honor to do so alongside young Hopis who have a cultural connection to the place. It's everything Justin McCarthy said he had hoped for when he left his family's New York City-based video production company during the COVID pandemic and moved west for a life outdoors. He now works in the woods during summer and as a Taos snowboard instructor in winter.
The Kaibab is every bit as awesome and ecologically important as the Grand Canyon below it, McCarthy said.
"I feel like maybe this place gets overlooked because of the big hole in the ground to the south," he said. "This place deserves the work. It's so pretty."
Brandon Loomis covers environmental and climate issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Reach him at [email protected].
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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: The race is on to restore a spring-fed creek torched by Dragon Bravo