Witness to Water: One Photographer's Mission to Defend the Colorado River

For six million years, the Colorado River flowed to the sea.

Sadly, this is no longer the case. Dammed, polluted, and redirected to sustain ever-increasing demand from cities and agriculture, the mighty Colorado now runs dry more than a hundred miles from where it once met the ocean. This disruption of a critical natural resource has caused untold ecological devastation.

Award-winning photographer and filmmaker Pete McBride has documented these alarming changes, undertaking a source-to-sea journey of hundreds of miles to see for himself what had become of his beloved backyard river. Witness to Water chronicles that journey and McBride’s mission to fight for conservation and restoration of the Colorado, as well as a similar source-to-sea journey along the Ganges, and the infamous 750-mile hike through the Grand Canyon that would become the subject of New York Times bestseller A Walk in the Park by Kevin Fedarko.

See the Colorado River as never before, through the eyes of one of its greatest advocates. McBride paints a riveting picture of the water crisis in which we find ourselves and what we risk if we don’t do the work to fix it.