Posted on January 31, 2019 by Mike Forsberg
If you listen closely and long enough, every rivulet, stream and river has a song – each note, measure and verse comprised of every force that has ever shaped it and every creature that has ever drawn life from its waters. And if these watery lifelines have songs, then their most striking melodies are sung […]
Posted on January 31, 2019 by Mariah Lundgren
In the upper reaches of North America’s watersheds, one will find a charismatic chunky gray bird dipping and diving underwater in clear, fast-flowing streams. This bird is called the American dipper and is North America’s only aquatic songbird. Photographer and conservationist Mike Forsberg fell in love with the American dipper on a college fishing trip. […]
Posted on September 8, 2015 by Mariah Lundgren
Let me introduce you to our latest permanent time-lapse cameras located in the high country of the South Platte River Basin, 50 miles southeast of downtown Denver. These two cameras are capturing change over time at the Cheesman reservoir and spillway. Cheesman Dam became the world’s tallest dam at 221 feet when construction finished in […]
Posted on August 11, 2015 by Michael Farrell
____________________________________ Cheesman Dam At the end of the 19th century Denver was reaching the half-century mark. By 1900, the former mining camp founded in 1858 at the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River had grown to 130,000. Denver’s early efforts at providing safe and reliable water first depended on water taken directly […]
Posted on July 22, 2015 by Ariana Brocious
Colorado Parks and Wildlife is one of several state and federal agencies that has been working for decades to recover the federally threatened greenback cutthroat trout. But a few years ago, new genetic research revealed that they’d been saving the wrong subspecies.
Posted on June 24, 2015 by Ariana Brocious
When the sun rises early, so do we. A couple Saturdays ago the PBT team spent the morning watching the sun creep over the snow-covered peak of Mount Lincoln, above Montgomery Reservoir. We were exploring the headwaters of the South Platte River, in some of the farthest-west territory of the Platte River Basin, a region […]
Posted on May 15, 2015 by Peter Stegen
Here at the international headquarters of the Platte Basin Timelapse project in Lincoln, Nebraska, there are times when unplanned or unexpected things happen. When those unplanned or unexpected things are too good to resist we document them. Take for example last Thursday (May 7, 2015). The Lincoln airport reported 6.65 inches of rain, which may not sound like […]
Posted on December 5, 2014 by Ariana Brocious
The Platte River Basin is expansive and diverse. One of my favorite parts of this geography is Phantom Canyon, a small preserve nestled into the land where the mountains meet the plains, in the Laramie Foothills of northern Colorado. Driving in, we nearly always spot pronghorn moving across the land, their soft brown eyes and […]
Posted on August 22, 2014 by Ariana Brocious
They traveled in buckets, passed hand to hand from truck bed to lakeshore, before being carefully upended just above the surface by proud biologists. With each splash, another batch of young greenback cutthroat trout slid into the glassy waters of Zimmerman Lake – back into their native range high in Colorado’s South Platte River Basin.
Posted on November 3, 2013 by Steven Speicher
In September 2013, it began to rain in Colorado. And it didn’t stop. Northwest of Fort Collins, the North Fork of the Cache La Poudre River soon carried record amounts of water. In just a few days, flows leapt from three cubic feet per second (cfs) to more than 1000 cfs when the upstream dam could not hold any more water and began to spill over.