The difference is as night and day, Mark Farmer says as the four-wheel drive vehicle struggles to make it up the narrow, washed-out dirt trail.
Arriving about 34 miles up the canyon on U.S. Forest Service land, a distinct and definite change in scenery has taken shape.A large expanse of yellow grasses, bushy shrubs and fallen, rotting pinyon and juniper trees dot a 30-acre parcel of land at an elevation of between 6,200 and 6,500 feet.
The area's perimeter is lined by living - but degraded - pinyons and junipers, or "PJs" as they are called, that climb and descend grayish-green shale ravines and gullies.
In the same area five years ago, two Caterpillar tractors dragged between them a 90-pound-per-link anchor chain and ripped up the PJs from their roots - as well as some of the sagebrush that peppers the landscape.
Now, the area the Cats chained is still clearly visible.
Twenty-four different species of grasses, forbs (broad-leafed flowering plants) and shrubs - immediately seeded into the broken-up ground following the chainings - are now waist- to shoulder-high.
Bitterbrush, Great Basin wild rye, curl leaf mahogany, Paiute orchard grass, astragalus cicer, cheat grass and wild alfalfa cover the expanse where the PJs once tied up all the water and nutritive resources, suppressing and choking out vegetation.
Considered controversial by some, the chaining process continued each fall for four years.
"People don't realize we're not just deforesting areas because we want to," Farmer said. "These woodlands are really at an ecological dead end. They've passed through what restoration ecologists call a `threshold of irreversibility'; they can't be brought back to their original condition by simply removing the disturbance."
Farmer, who in April received his master's degree from Brigham Young University's department of botany and range science, wrote his thesis about the effects chaining had on the more than 300 acres in Spanish Fork Canyon.
He worked on the project with the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources and the U.S. Forest Service's Shrub Sciences Lab in Pro-vo.
He said the area was grazed mainly by sheep and cattle from the late 1800s to the 1970s. Then grazing stopped because of concern about the watershed.
"But in the 25-year period since grazing stopped, the woodland hasn't recovered. Once those areas get that degraded your management options are so limited there's not much you can do," he said. "You either burn them, if there's anything left to carry a controlled burn, or you've got to chain them. That's the most economical way to take care of it."
"We used to equate chaining with grazing, but that's not the case anymore," said Jim Davis, a research biologist with the Division of Wildlife Resources. "Now it's kind of like landscape engineering for wildlife. We're getting an unbelievable amount of wildlife up here."
To gauge the effects of chaining, Farmer set up 20, 2-meter by 5-meter control plots in 1991 to measure water runoff and soil erosion in the PJ woodland. These "micro-watersheds" were paired, one set up in the chained area, and one in comparable terrain and soil type in the unchained region.
"From 1990 to 1994, unchained plots produced an average of five times more runoff and eight times more sediment than chained plots," he said.
"This is water going directly into the soil, going in to where you can get springs," Davis said. "That over there is just going down making dirty water, into Spanish Fork River, eventually into Utah Lake."
"Chaining's not going to change the infiltration capacity of the soil; even a plow isn't going to do that," Farmer said. "But what it does do is it increases the amount of time water has to infiltrate the ground."
Over the four-year period of Farmer's study, anchor chaining permitted living vegetative cover to increase fivefold and increased litter (fallen trees and debris) nearly twofold on the Spanish Fork Canyon site.
From his studies, Farmer concluded: "Anchor chaining can have a major impact on stabilization of degraded pinyon and juniper woodland soils by converting patchy juniper and pinyon canopy cover to more uniform ground cover of herbaceous vegetation."
Five times more elk and three times more deer were found in the chained areas.
"If you interspace small chainings like this you're going to get a lot more species," Farmer said. "Species that like openings over here, species that like the forest over there and this enhances your species diversity, by producing a mosaic of different environmental types and vegetation types."
In southern Utah, a government study in May determined chaining may be the best way to slow erosion in the Muddy Creek-Or-der-ville drainage and would assist in reducing salinity in the Colorado River system.
A draft environmental impact statement released by the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service determined chaining and plowing were necessary to end a century of erosion problems caused by overgrazing.
The chaining is scheduled to be carried out next spring on 5,270 acres of state and private land within the 69,000-acre drainage in Kane County.
"Chaining done wrong can lead to more erosion. But chaining done right leads to biological diversity. If we let this area go, we'll be heading into a badlands type of situation," agency geologist Robert Rasely said.