This article focuses on the implementation of an ecological rehabilitation project in the northeastern uplands of Turkey. In the last decade, the Çoruh River has been transformed into a series of reservoirs through the construction of ten large dams. While dams lead to drastic socio-natural transformations, the long-term maintenance of these big infrastructures depends on environmental conditions such as the amount of sediment that the rivers carry over long distances, which over time accumulates in the reservoir. Foresters have therefore been conducting a watershed rehabilitation project in Çoruh’s uplands to protect dams from the effects of soil erosion and sedimentation. The rehabilitation project casts uplands – seemingly far away places from the dam construction site – as places of ecological and infrastructural value, whose recovery is infrastructural to the maintenance of dams. The suggested ecological recovery in the uplands is, however, interwoven with longer histories of rural depopulation and land abandonment. In this context, quaking aspen trees start to proliferate on the formerly cultivated and grazed lands. For the foresters, such abandonment ecologies are glorified registers of nature’s recovery: the forest’s comeback to reclaim spaces once occupied by the villagers. Overgrown lands, simultaneously, index a history of neglect and desolation for upland inhabitants, engendering feelings of pity and dislike. Quaking aspens, saplings, and bushes that spread over formerly cultivated lands become markers of the gradual and silent dissolution of a lively landscape—a landscape which inhabitants once took care of and maintained by means of labor-intensive livelihood practices.