This ranch was initially part of the Diamond-A ranch or the Grey Ranch in the boothills, so it was a huge ranch that went from south of the border in Mexico all of the way to Socorro. We had never heard the term cienega when we bought this ranch, we just wanted to find to find some wilderness to help restore when we retired...we found that there is no wilderness left, and the closest thing to it is a cattle ranch, so we bought this place, we knew it had water, we did a little research and found out it was a cienega. We realized its importance and started soliciting funds and now that we're going you sort of have a cynergy. 
Cienega literally means "cien-aguas" or 100 waters in Spanish, and the definition is "slow moving water, or marsh." It's not a swamp, it's not a bog, it's a marsh and there are certain types of plants that grow in a marsh that don't grow anywhere else in the world.
This is a very benign, very small feature, but obviously there are canyons all along here, and it all adds to the watercourse, so that's a little half a day job that has one-rock dam in there and it has some posts to hold the rocks in place because water comes rushing out of there and it rips this out, so we're trying to slow it wherever we can.
The project, fundamentally is to return the functionality of the cienega, to get the burro cienega to function today like it did 150 years ago. It's been in-sized in some areas as much as 10 feet, so we've got to build the bottom up, and we've been doing that with partner's funds.
You can see what we've done. We've put these three, we call them perpendicular post-veins, we put these veins in six feet deep, and you can see over there how much deeper the soil is. When this covers, we'll come back and put three more in here and they'll be higher than these. 
So we've just about, with the next partner's program we will be finished with tier one, so we will have installed 150, maybe 200 grade control structures over this 8.6 mile reach of the Burro Cienega that's on this ranch, and then when those cover we'll go back and do tier two, when those cover we'll go back and do tier three, and by tier four, the cienega will be built up, and it won't look like a creek anymore it will be built up. The water when it comes down will then spread out and it will be a football field wide instead of 6 inches wide.