At the top of South Pass, on the lower edge of the Wind River Range, piles of fragmented stone mine "trash" shine, dark in the late summer brightness. At the dispersed site where I tried to camp under a grove of small aspens, a desiccated white-faced calf in the hoof-pocked mud of empty streambed attracted flies. The BLM’s sometimes nickname—Bureau of Livestock and Mines—rises in the haze of high desert heat. But early the next morning when I make it to the restoration project site, I meet range manager Steve, his twenty-something  realtor son, and a buff rangelands ecologist colleague as we wander through the visible efforts of previous work teams, flushing a large group of iconic, but imperiled, sage grouse.

Enter Leah, the area BLM’s wildlife biologist and our project leader. She recorded sage grouse breeding ground information here in early spring, and recognized an opportunity presented by this densely compacted and eroding high elevation meadow. Here, in a low spot between rounded, sage-covered slopes, winter winds deposit up to ten feet of snow, stored moisture that becomes the headwaters of a tributary to the Sweetwater River. To support thriving sage grouse populations, meadows like these need to retain that moisture through months of increasingly extreme heat. Five centuries of cattle and oxen, beginning with westward movement of escapees from Europe’s chaos and the coal-smothered cities already sprouted on our east coast, have reduced the soil’s sponge-like capacity to keep this green ribbon of critical habitat functional for all the wildlife that depend on it. From pronghorn to sage sparrow, even species dependent on an expansive sea of sagebrush gotta have water.

That’s where the rest of us came in. Lauren is an organizer with Wyoming Wilderness Association, Meghan and Big Wind work for the Wyoming Outdoor Council, and they enlisted members—and kids—for the alchemy of turning old iron mine “trash” rock into green gold on the landscape. By hand, three teams moved rock to gullied wounds, then puzzle-fit pieces into different structures as described by a researcher named Zeedyk. Constantly bending to pick up stone and bending again to place it became a group pilgrimage of sorts, as everyone bowed, over and over, to the possibilities of our beneficial effects for the planet.

At lunch break, Big Wind dispelled a misperception many of us held about the toxin in chokecherry pits: if allowed to dry (preferably in the sun), cyanide leaches out, leaving the most nutritious part, the pit's nut, available and ready to be ground with the fruity flesh into patties. Big Wind likes to show Reservation kids the old way of grinding pits between stones, because efficiency isn’t always the highest goal. Water racing away from its home mountains is exactly what we hoped to slow down. And our slow work of placing rock by rock into well-fitted structures became joyfully addictive, as it brought together sometimes competing NGOs with agency staff who often meet each other in conflict, to find this way forward, together.