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For more than two decades, the Colorado-born photographer Pete McBride has documented the overwhelming beauty and the gathering threats to the Colorado River.
Now with the lowest snowpack on record in his home state and the basin’s reservoirs approaching historic lows, McBride is stepping out from behind the camera to write a book detailing a lifelong love affair with his “backyard river.”
Part memoir and part travelogue from his National Geographic and other magazine assignments, Witness to Water is a cry from McBride’s heart about a river ecosystem being strained to the breaking point.
“It’s slowly getting worse and people want to be positive about it, but we have to come to the reality that this is a very serious situation,” he said in an interview with Circle of Blue.
Amid the gloom, McBride draws strength from tangible victories. His first rafting trip through the Colorado River delta, in 2008, ended in a “Frappuccino pit” of mud, froth, and gunk where the river no longer reached the Sea of Cortez.
Five years later he returned to witness a pulse flow through the delta, North America’s largest desert estuary. Extra water released from upstream dams rejuvenated a dry ecosystem, seeding new cottonwoods and willows. Birds – Gila woodpecker, brown-headed cowbird, ash-throated flycatcher, yellow-breasted chat and others – flocked to the revived habitat.
“I’ve seen the potential,” McBride said. “I’ve seen what I call the ‘earned hope,’ people working together hard to bring things back.”
The full interview
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