A reflection on the stories we tell about Colorado’s rivers and how they shape our landscapes, communities, and future.
Shared by Colorado Water Trust Volunteer of the Year, Ray Kennedy.
Colorado River Stories
In early February, I was fortunate to attend Colorado River Stories, an event at CU Boulder highlighting voices and perspectives connected to the Colorado River.
Organized by CU Boulder’s Center for Humanities & the Arts, and Impact Playback, CU’s Playback Ensemble, this event was a wonderful, challenging, and at many times emotional enactment of the stories and cultures that have and continue to touch the mighty Colorado River.
Impact Playback specializes in short-form improvisational reenactments to afford the audience and story-teller(s) an opportunity to more deeply connect with stories beyond their words.
During the event, a mosaic of audience members shared their stories, from a Native American storyteller reflecting on their community’s relationship to water through the lens of forever chemicals and their impacts on the natural environment and our health, to a tenured professor of water engineering who has floated/rafted the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon for research and adventure on multiple occasions. Each of these stories were then acted out by the Ensemble, using props like a blue scarf to signify water and a box representing a stage envisioning a military draft, among hand and body gestures to represent everything from turning on a faucet (acting out a story about saving water) to hot turf (showing how uncomfortable synthetic supplements to grass are in our environments).
While words were used in the performance, albeit sparingly, the connection between the story and the actors, and ultimately the audience, made a journey from the spoken word to a more emotional level of understanding for much of the audience looking on. This format allowed for a deeper interpretation and embodiment of each story as though we were there experiencing it alongside the storytellers. What started as an uncomfortable “oh, this is going to be a long two-hour event” quickly became a genuinely impactful experience, even with my doubtful attitude at the outset.
Water’s importance, as I have seen frequently as a Colorado Water Trust volunteer, is incredibly complex across audiences and water users. Yet it always seems to flow – pardon the pun – from the dichotomy between understanding and misunderstanding. Water rights are in themselves complicated, and for the average non–water lawyer, often too dense to feel worthwhile to explore. But an event like the one I attended at CU led me to two questions:
- How does the theme of deservingness play out, and how does it live alongside conservation?
- How can we be in touch with our natural world of water, especially in our backyard of Colorado, through better, more honest stories that lead to deeper connection?
Deservingness is, like water, complex as the underlying foundation of the concept has become a hot-button topic in recent political conversations. Deservingness takes on a life of its own when seen through the lens of our Colorado waters; asking both what its users deserve and what the water itself deserves. This is especially thought provoking in light of the Colorado River Indian Tribes’ 2025 resolution recognizing the river as a living being with inherent rights, a powerful declaration rooted in Indigenous values and stewardship.
Hearing stories of ecological challenges and habitat loss, especially through the voices of Indigenous peoples who view water and land as part of a unified, living system, was deeply moving.
What stories do our rivers in Colorado tell us about ourselves and our future?
And how can more open and honest storytelling create awareness of what’s possible through collaboration and collective understanding of how complex water in the West truly is?
Too often, we fall back on notions like: “We’ll figure it out,” “Desalination solutions will be here soon,” or “We can simply cut back on water we don’t need – golf courses, lawns, shorter showers – and restore flows to the river.”
On a friend’s recommendation, my family and I recently watched The American Southwest documentary, which explores the urgent need for balanced water management negotiations in 2026, with a particular focus on Tribal lands and the many ecosystems that support wildlife along the Colorado River Basin. The film beautifully illustrates the interdependence of river life: beavers shaping wetlands that sustain countless species; salmon flies requiring predictable, cool-water flows to complete their life cycles and, in turn, feeding the salmon population; and California condors nesting along the Grand Canyon’s cliffs.
While the waters’ benefits to the natural ecological world are immense, and nourish great ecosystems that support diverse biomes, groups of wildlife, and networks of vegetation, the human and social benefits from the river basin are equally and undeniably great. From recreation that includes floating, rafting, and fishing, to irrigation for key crops in agricultural regions, to our own personal water supplies that nourish our daily lives, it is undeniable that water is integral and essential.
The event at CU opened my eyes and mind to seeing solutions to increasing flows in our rivers by taking an open-minded and alternative approach to the stories we tell ourselves about water.
Listening to every user, be it the recreational organization that is concerned about snowpack, the farmer who needs dependable ditch use to maintain their usual crop rotation (and income), the Denver resident whose backyard pool is the highlight of their social life and brings their community together, the homeowner whose land is threatened by flooding from a new reservoir project, or the water itself, who is a living being.
My time volunteering and seeing firsthand the impactful, apolitical, work Colorado Water Trust is doing to benefit all river users across our state; recreationist, farmer, rancher, admirer, municipal water user, and beyond has encouraged me to understand that the story of our great rivers, streams, and creeks is still being written, and I believe it carries a hopeful undercurrent.
This all brings me to a final thought, commonly traced to Buddhist philosophy, of the snake and the rope:
To paraphrase, one is walking on a path at dusk and spots a snake. There are two obvious decisions to be made; either run towards the snake and attack it to protect oneself, or, run away. The third, more seldom taken path, is to carefully approach the snake, wherein only then, one will recognize the snake as actually just a rope.
The dim light impacted our ability to see beyond the illusion, or, the status quo.
I find this analogy to be especially powerful when it comes to solutions for our water challenges:
We can either take reality for the stories we have told ourselves, that the West’s water challenges are irremediable, and can only be fixed if we _____ (stop driving cars, stop filling our swimming pools, stop voting for ____, take 30 second showers, etc.), or, we can find meaning in our own stories. Stories that I believe can be found in the natural abundance of life that Colorado’s rivers give to us and ultimately bring us closer together and to the gifts that nature provides.
Between the simplest days driving up Boulder Canyon with my wife and daughter to lay out a blanket on the banks of Boulder Creek – whose flows owe much to CWT’s Jasper Lake Project – and hearing the diverse stories shared at CU, I’ve come to see how vital it is to experience these waterways firsthand, beyond the headlines and screens.
Ray Kennedy
Colorado Water Trust Volunteer
As a volunteer with Colorado Water Trust, I’m grateful for the chance to share my personal reflections above. They represent my own perspective and not necessarily that of the organization.