The Gila River in New Mexico's Cliff-Gila Valley is doing something that would have seemed impossible a generation ago: it is remembering how to be a river.
Once squeezed into narrow, bulldozed channels and constrained by levees well into the 1970s, the Gila is now reclaiming the messy, braided floodplain it needs to survive. The transformation has happened almost without deliberate human engineering—driven instead by the river's own insistent power and a change in human restraint. A new case study published in Hydrological Processes by Ellen Soles, Martha Cooper, and Laurel Saito documents what this recovery means for the entire Southwest: when you let a river sprawl, it heals.
The work began in the Cliff-Gila Valley, just downstream from where the Gila Wilderness releases its water. Cooper, now The Nature Conservancy's freshwater program director for New Mexico, spent years with Soles trudging through the river itself, transect by transect, mapping how the landscape was changing. What they discovered was a lesson written in water and roots. When the Gila floods and braids across its floodplain, it leaves behind secondary channels—old passages that don't dry completely. Even when surface flows vanish in drought years, groundwater continues flowing through these abandoned channels, allowing native cottonwoods and willows to send their roots down and survive. Cooper recalls the moment this clicked into place: "When the river was up—in pseudo-flood—and Ellen and I were walking down to a transect, my foot kind of broke through the soil and literally there was water rushing underneath my foot."
The numbers tell a story of damage and recovery. By 1960, decades of channelization had confined the river's active floodplain to less than half its historic width. Native forest cover had withered to just 40 to 50 percent of what it was in the early 20th century. The Gila had been forced into submission—or so people believed. But big rivers don't take confinement quietly. By the 1984 floods, people stopped trying to squeeze the channel tighter. By the late 1990s, livestock were removed from most of the valley's floodplain. By 2000, something remarkable had happened: the active floodplain was almost as wide as before channelization began.
What emerged was a landscape alive with secondary channels, scour holes where groundwater breaks the surface into small wetlands, and riparian forest knitting itself back together. In places like the Mogollon Box where the Gila meets Mogollon Creek, visitors can still see what a wild floodplain looks like. Even in the valley, the messiness is returning. A recent meander that the river cut off during a big flood has become a secondary channel, now lined with young cottonwoods and willows. It's not ideal for boating anymore, but the river is doing something far more important: building resilience.
That heterogeneity—the complexity that comes from a river doing what rivers do—has concrete benefits. Long-term data shows that when people stopped bulldozing channels and allowing livestock to graze freely, the river and its neighbors became more resilient to droughts, floods, and fire. During recent floods, adjacent landowners lost less land than they had in previous years. The Gila has become a living experiment in a vital truth: sometimes the best restoration work is knowing when to step back and let nature remember itself.