rivers

Peter McBride

The tale of the once-mighty Colorado waterway, part of Tuesday’s Banff Mountain Film Festival tour stop

In a sense, photographer Pete McBride has been preparing to make Chasing Water all his life. Raised on a cattle ranch in central Colorado, he grew up working hay fields irrigated by snowmelt that carved the Grand Canyon and slaked the thirst of the Southwest. “I often used to think about water,” says McBride in the film. “I wondered how much went into our fields and how much returned to the creek ... I wondered how long it would take irrigation water to reach the sea.” Later, as a photographer for National Geographic, Outside and Men’s Journal, McBride traveled to some of the world’s most exotic locales—often, as it happened, shooting stories that related in some way to water.

Where the water is