Water: The Sacred Gift

-Funding for "Water: The Sacred Gift" has been provided by... the Newendorp Family Charitable Foundation Fund, dedicated to preservation of our natural environment.

Additional funding provided by... Visit Estes Park -- prioritizing destination stewardship and helping to inspire reverence in Estes Park and its surrounding land.

VisitEstesPark.com.

-The High Rockies -- a place where a distinctive alpine Arctic ecosystem is hauntingly beautiful... resulting from centuries of resonant coexistence.

[ Birds singing ] Life here has defied destruction... delicately powerful among the extremities of our planet.

Sometimes labeled stunted, which would imply altered, these plants are not.

They are what they are, having evolved into their own form uniquely qualified to live.

[ Chirping ] Compact critters roam among them along the rocky, soft surface of frozen earth, dependably balanced for resident life.

[ Chirps ] Gracefully tall beings seek the cool respite from the summer of the valley below.

Winged residents who find enough substance in the thin air to lift their feathers refine their plumage to match the colors of the seasons.

This is the alpine tundra of the Rocky Mountains.

[ Wind howling ] -I've been forecasting here for a third of a century, and we're seeing the snowpack melting out sooner.

We're getting hotter summers, drier droughts, wetter floods.

Everything is just on steroids.

And it's that change that is making every one of those things worse.

The analogy that I like to use is that weather is like one play in a football game, and climate is like the history of the National Football League.

The problem with the tundra is that, you know, mountains are pointed.

And so if you're getting warmer conditions, yeah, some of the flora and the fauna and the animals can move uphill a little bit, but there's less and less territory up there.

So it's not something that is sustainable.

If we continue with carbon emissions as we are now, 100 million tons a day globally, by the end of this century, the climate of Denver will be more like that of northern Mexico.

And then imagine what the climate of Estes Park is gonna be.

You'll be talking about triple-digit temperatures in the summertime right at the gates of Rocky Mountain National Park.

-Some people find it kind of confusing that you can have both floods and droughts with warming.

And, you know, sorry.

It's just the way it works.

The hotter it is, the more energy there is in the climate system.

It evaporates more water from the ground.

There's more water vapor in the atmosphere because of all the evaporation from the ocean.

So when it rains, you're wringing more water out of the rainfall and bringing big, heavy floods.

On the other hand, when it's not raining, that air has been warmed and it can soak up more water, so you have more droughts.

And it really does go both ways, that wet times tend to get wetter and the dry times tend to get drier.

-I've been studying pikas for 36 years now.

[ Pika chirps ] And I was born in 1964, and that might seem irrelevant, but during that year, there was a man named Bob Krear, who was studying pikas right on Niwot Ridge over there.

I was lucky enough to find this study site.

I found it in 2007... and by 2008, I had temperature sensors there, and I kept them there.

And just a little over a year ago, we came out with a paper comparing the temperatures in that one year when I was born to temperatures nowadays.

It turns out that, of course, as we all would guess, the air temperatures at that site are warmer now than they were 50 years ago.

That's what I expected.

I expected, in fact, that the air temperature would be even warmer and maybe the subsurface temperatures would be a little warmer too, but not as much.

There wouldn't be as much change as the air temperatures.

But I was totally wrong.

The subsurface temperatures had changed a lot more than the air temperatures.

The subsurface temperatures, in most of the year, are 10 degrees warmer now than they used to be.

And that's 10 degrees Celsius.

That's a lot of degrees.

[ Water surging ] -Moisture gifted from the clouds collects among the plant life and obeys as gravity organizes streamlets to connect.

Now follow the flow eventually into Coyote Valley -- Kawuneeche as named by the descendants of the original caretakers.

The word is Arapaho but also used by the Ute -- not perfect neighbors in a place where the original Mountain Ute population felt threatened by the western-driven Plains Arapaho and the invading Europeans.

What is a watershed -- simply a place where water flows down from higher to lower elevations?

Or is it a complex habitat where plants and animals directly affect and effect the constitution of the landscape?

[ Elk bugles ] A place where the climate can realign the wildlife, the trees, the shrubs, the grasses and flowers according to natural global events... and now the impact of an industrialized world?

By its simplest definition, a watershed is a place where melting snow and rainwater is distributed from a higher elevation to a lower elevation.

And we all know where climate fits in, but what about technology, even primitive technology -- like picks and shovels -- when over 100 years ago the Colorado River was altered before it even had a chance to get started?

We have been altering places where, after the original caretakers were driven out, there had been little or no regard for environmental impact for nearly two centuries, except for Stephen Mather, Theodore Roosevelt, and the efforts of an adolescent National Park Service, where the best intentions of Gifford Pinchot and the original U.S. Forest Service land use policies often fell victim to inherent flaws, only to become wounded by financial interests, power, and greed.

Responsible scientific stewardship is struggling to catch up while climate change exasperates the situation.

Now, here in the valley of the coyote, where lodgepole pine had grown in perfect size uniformity resulting from the destruction of the late mid-1800s fires, where they all started regrowing at once until attacked by hungry beetles in this century, and then the firestorm of 2020... A place where the Colorado River had lost part of the contributing snowmelt of the appropriately named Never Summer Range... ...lost when the Eastern Plains water interests diverted it through the Grand Ditch.

Continuing the attack on the western flow, the post-Kawuneeche Valley Colorado River would be sent east through a tunnel under the Continental Divide.

Here is a perfectly placed riparian valley where wildlife challenge each other, where calculated management had caused, corrected, and caused a jagged spiral of good intentions... ...where fossil fuels accelerate a challenge.

Scott, here we are on the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park on a beautiful Colorado summer morning.

But last week, it was several days in a row that were either at 90 or above here in the mountains.

What's that about?

-It's getting hotter.

I mean, the world is heating up.

Oh, the average goes up, and so our highs get higher, our lows get higher.

Everything is sort of nudging towards higher and higher temperatures.

It's climate change.

The carbon that we burn, the coal, oil and gas, puts CO2 up in the air.

The CO2 traps the heat, holds that heat in to the world, and the world warms up.

And just like anything else, if you put heat into the bottom of a pot of water, lo and behold, the temperature of that water goes up.

And it's the same thing with our world.

-Locally, we're really feeling it here.

People will say to me, "Yeah, we have 90 degree days sometimes in Estes Park."

I go, "Yeah, but..." -"But how often?"

Those extremely high temperatures happen more often than they used to.

And by definition, that's a change in the climate, right?

A change in the statistics of the weather.

We've seen about two degrees Fahrenheit, maybe close to three degrees Fahrenheit of warming here compared to when you and I were kids.

And if we keep burning coal and oil and gas like we have been, perhaps another five or six degrees Fahrenheit in the next several decades.

That's a lot.

People absolutely notice.

Anybody who's been up here long enough will notice that the weather is different than it used to be.

-Well, we see it.

We see it in the park.

Obviously, we're talking about the watershed here, and it's changing.

-I just drove up the canyon, and during that hot spell that you're talking about, there was a big fire down in Big Thompson Canyon.

I'd been driving up that road for 45 years.

I've never seen it burn.

It burned all the way down to the river.

There was the Cameron Peak fire in 2020.

That burned all the way from the Continental Divide down to the plains.

Talk about a change in the watershed.

I mean, you're really changing the vegetation, changing the soil, changing the runoff, changing the way that the landscape interacts with the atmosphere.

It's really pretty dramatic.

-What about the messaging?

It sounds like people aren't listening to each other.

I don't understand the best way to get the messaging out.

-I think people hear each other maybe more than you give them credit for, Nick.

People hear you.

I see people coming to your films.

I see you making a difference in this world.

I feel like, when we talk to the public and even just when we talk to each other, it's important to be authentic, to speak from the heart, to speak from my own experience.

-Fires have always been a part of healthy mountain forests.

But after years of suppression and overgrowth, devastatingly large burns in proximity to communities, exasperated by the climate, are a force to contend with, making it hard to appreciate the natural necessity.

After a swath of forest burns, regeneration of replacement species begins rapidly.

There's no question that fire affects migration.

After the recent fires, there is little doubt that a number of moose were driven by fire and smoke to cross to the east side of the Continental Divide.

Many less publicly noticeable species were also affected.

[ Crow caws in distance ] -We just caught an owl right here.

See it?

[ Hooting ] Here's the owl.

So, the owl came in this way.

Came from this side.

He flew in here, hit this net about here and dropped into the pocket.

Here's the other, and there's the owl.

This is an impressive little owl.

-That's beautiful.

-It's called a northern saw-whet owl.

It's a wild bird.

Never saw a person before in his life.

And here he is, calm as a cucumber.

What's interesting so far this year, we have not caught one single juvenile bird this year.

Every bird we caught this year was at least two years old.

So, where are all the juvenile birds?

I think that, because of the smoke last fall, I think it was devastating for these birds, because these owls are going to sit very quietly on a branch, usually right up against the trunk of the tree.

When the smoke came through, they may have just thought, "This is great.

Now it's all sudden dark 24 hours.

This is incredible."

And so -- But they didn't realize that the smoke could have been killing them.

-Yeah.

-We all had face masks on to protect us from the fine particles of the smoke, right?

The birds didn't have that.

Their lungs, some of those lungs are the size of your thumb.

-When these fires came through, the fire itself burned a limited area.

I mean, huge, but left a lot of it.

But the smoke was everywhere.

-Correct.

We saw this climate change, we saw the fires last year in real time right here.

-Yeah.

That's what -- That's what that is.

Like, a fire or a weather situation is a real-time effect of climate.

-It's pretty bizarre to think about it, to think about how bad it actually is.

-So you're, like, alarmed?

-Well, yeah, this is real time.

-You're really alarmed.

And people should be.

-Yeah.

-[ Chuckles ] It's like, "Oh."

-And there he goes.

Released unharmed.

[ Birds singing ] -This is the famous Sky Pond -- famous and fascinating in many ways.

Fascinating because it's so popular and so damn hard to get to.

I mean, this is one heck of a climb, and especially when the water is running the way it is today.

And it is absolutely one of the most beautiful places in the Rocky Mountains.

I mean, not just Rocky Mountain National Park.

This is -- This is just a perfect setting.

And because of that, a lot of people come here.

It is us, those people, that will save this place.

Sustainability is a process, an experiment not yet settled in the onset nor current state of this evolution.

As caretakers unable to pass through without sensory interruptions, welcomely pausing our progress, what is it we see in our parallel passions?

One, to simply absorb the spiritual pleasure of our surroundings, and the other to accept the responsibility of conservation.

We can let nature take its course and accept the consequences, but must we accept the irresponsible implications of accelerated human indulgence with no regard for destruction?

Then why on Earth are we here?

Literally, why on Earth?

-I bring my family or anybody.

-You deal with visitor information in the park.

Do you find that the visitors respond to you in particular?

-I believe that by reminding each other that we should be a part of nature and not detach from it is one way that we can heal nature.

And it's a simple message of remembering that human beings are a part of the ecosystem.

And how do we come back to that ecosystem?

And it's through visiting nature and visiting national parks and reconnecting with the water and the trees and the feeling of the wind flowing.

Right now, I hear that wind flowing through these trees, and when I hear that wind flowing and I hear the water flowing at the same time, and I close my eyes, and I cannot differentiate between the sound of the water and the sound of the wind, that is how I feel reconnected to nature, and that is how I feel reconnected to what I call our ancestors that are here.

-Native American conservation philosophies were barely given more than token appreciation in the 20th century.

Now, as we, the newly arrived, are educated and enlightened, permission and forgiveness is a philosophy in itself, a transformative gift.

-We carry our ancestors with us.

And if I carry the past ancestors with us who suffered, then I have to carry them into the future in this brief time I'm here on the Earth.

And I become an ancestor.

I'm looking at the future generations being able to carry the story of us in the future.

Which means it's not a linear way of thinking.

It's not "the past is here, and the future is here, and the present sits here."

It's the ancestors are being carried with us into the future, and we're just a part of that circular way of thinking.

-When the circle comes around, it is clear we are all in this together.

-Do you know, like, what was brought?

Maybe grab a [indistinct] and throw it up right here.

My name is Michelle Gibbons.

I am the lead restoration technician here at the park.

I lead and supervise all the revegetation projects we implement here in Rocky.

Okay, so everyone is situated?

Like... -I think so, yeah.

Everyone has a spot to plant.

-At Rock Cut, we are revegging a social trail in the alpine tundra with native alpine tundra plants that we have growing out in our greenhouse.

Without us coming in and actively planting this site, it won't rebound on its own just due to the fact it can take centuries for these plants to recover on their own.

There's a lot of hard work going into this project, and we have a great seasonal staff doing a bulk of this work.

-Sometimes solitary but superbly satisfying to share, differing people who otherwise may find passive tolerance or even bellicose intolerance, leaving the politicians to dive into their conscience.

Here we simply share, exposing the best of human nature.

That is the power of this place.

-I've been visiting Rocky Mountain National Park since I was four years old.

My parents were pretty adamant of traveling in the west with my brother and I.

I have all these photos of me of a young child in different areas of the park.

And now working here, I have actually done projects in those areas, whether it's restoring a wetland in that area or restoring alpine tundra.

It's really cool that I have photos standing in those exact areas, and now I'm actually doing something meaningful and long-lasting in these areas and actually making a difference in these areas.

So that's pretty cool.

-The story of the tundra is as harsh as it is breathtaking.

The passing season of bloom succumbs rapidly to an alpine autumn in late August.

Winter arrives in October.

Impossibly cold and windswept, the tundra now seems forbidding of life.

There will be little passage of large mammals until the thaw.

Several months pass until roadways exposed by our mechanized impatience allow our return.

This is the Alpine Visitor Center, and as you can see, conditions are relatively miserable right now.

This is May, and by the end of May, this will be open with lots of people, lots of visitors coming up here to enjoy this snowpack here in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Kyle, has anything changed this year?

Is anything different from previous years?

-You know, our amazing colleagues that plow the roads here, they start in mid-April and they just start moving from the west side to the east side.

But what they're doing is just patient chewing away at the snow.

-What is this year?

Is it typical?

Is it average?

What is it?

-From what the snowplow operators are telling us, they say it's pretty typical snowpack.

Maybe a little bit higher on the west side.

Pretty standard on the east side.

And what they have noticed this year is, you know, we just haven't had those really wet, heavy spring storms that we normally have March through early May.

We haven't had that heavy kind of concrete snow to dig through.

The other thing that they deal with so much up here is drifting.

So these big drifts on the side of the road, we haven't seen as large of drifts in some of our places that we normally see them.

-So how many years have you worked for the park?

-I started in the park in 1982 as a seasonal laborer.

Plowing actually, 2025.

-Is it relatively dangerous?

-If you'd been here yesterday, I had a nice little incident.

The steep sections here.

-Yeah.

-About this time of day, if you blow up under there and you can't get it far enough, it'll crack and slide a little bit.

-You made an avalanche down on you?

-It'll slide on this.

-Yeah.

-It didn't make it to me.

It stopped just shy.

But just -- All of a sudden, you see something moving and you're going, "Oh, reverse fast."

-Have you noticed changes over the years?

-I think the climate a little bit.

-Yeah.

-I think the biggest change I've noticed is the trees.

You've got the budworm here and you've had the beetle kill, and you can see how it's really thinned out.

This used to be to be really, really thick in here, and these drifts would be twice this deep.

-The drifts would be deeper because the trees were taller.

-Taller, and there's more of them and the sun would not hit them.

-So nothing's really average anymore?

-No.

This year is hard to judge because we got more snow, but we haven't had any major storms all through April.

-After more than six months of life under the snow, critters emerge -- pikas having survived off their precious stash of food... [ Pika chirps ] ...marmots waking up from a slowed metabolism form of hibernation.

This is no simple watershed.

Snowmelt here follows the rules of gravity in two global directions.

Large critters now follow the thaw to continue their intentional migrations.

Spring here begins a time where critically still cool temperatures warm just enough to permit the balance of the short, flourishing alpine summer.

A summer where we emerge as explorers, respectfully exploiting the magnificent geography.

For many of us, hiking and climbing becomes religious.

While absorbing the landscape, every view, precious details of flora and fauna, we focus, drift and meditate, losing then finding our significance.

We don't conquer mountains.

We experience them.

One of my favorite places anywhere is the summit of Flattop Mountain here in Rocky Mountain National Park.

This is an area -- I think of it as like an alpine wetlands, because the snow is still melting.

But even in this area, the ice is still melting.

Underneath these rocks, the water is collecting and beginning to run down the slope.

This is the beginning of the watershed for the Rocky Mountains.

This is in Rocky Mountain National Park, but this is duplicated in so many places across the Rockies.

My friend biologist Michelle Gibbons shares a keen awareness of the sensitive environment that surrounds us.

Simple plants, like the marsh marigold, indicate moist ground here at the very onset of this watershed.

Are these different because they're alpine?

Are they smaller?

-Yeah, they're just smaller.

-Okay.

-On another hike on a neighboring mountain, we discover a group of troubled trees, reminding us once again that life here is not easy.

-Oh, my God, I see the infection on it.

-You do?

-Yeah, I do.

It's...right here.

It looks like it's gotten in up here.

You can see it.

And then, just eventually, like, it'll keep working its way, but it doesn't spread from tree to tree.

It spreads tree to host, back to tree.

Yeah.

-It's complicated stuff.

-Yeah.

-In the valley below, the exquisite and graceful osprey reminds us of the significance of this watershed.

This is the Continental Divide.

Water here stops at stops at two fortunate first-use communities -- Estes Park to the east... and Grand Lake to the west -- before it flows to join the rest of the east/west divide to add in quenching the thirst of a continent.

Finding our way following the water to the Estes Valley, feeling small feels so good in this place where humans sometimes overstep our size.

Facilitating consequential changes through good intentions, not just with the climate evolution, but in management of land and critters.

Here in the valley, where a system once managed by beavers, it's subjected to wildlife not necessarily balanced.

[ Moose bugles ] Even in the middle of town with a simple, small riparian meadow.

We love our deer, elk, and growing numbers of moose, but...

So, Gary, we've been in a lot of parts of the national park together, around the park, around town.

And today, we're right here in basically the middle of town.

But it's an area that I've always been fascinated by, a little riparian area that has been affected by a lot of different factors.

And, so, what are we looking at here?

-So, one point, this was choked by willows.

And you can see the remnants in certain areas.

We know that, through the '80s, '90s, early 2000s, we had many, many elk in this area and more than the habitat could sustain over a long period of time.

Their nutritional needs are about the same as beaver, and being larger, they outcompeted beaver for the willows.

So the beaver moved out.

The stream, then, no longer had a dam that was pooling water up behind it, percolating down into the soil.

As the willows disappeared, the stream became extremely channeled, steep-sided, and just a straight runoff, rather than pooling up and being absorbed by this riparian sponge.

So what you get now, with climate change -- climate chaos, I sometimes refer to it -- we get these huge events of storms coming.

2013, we had a year's worth of precipitation.

Or we can have extreme drought.

And what happens -- rather than having this sponge that mediates the effects of that chaos, unpredictability, kind of mediates it and allowing the water to flow out slowly.

Now we just have this incised channel running through here, and you get a big rain, boom, all the water runs off.

You get a drought, you've just got a dry streambed.

So it's the importance of having a balance.

They're all connected.

-So you're saying every critter and every plant that's here is just part of the system.

-It is.

It is.

-And it's not in balance anymore.

-No.

No.

-No, there's no balance here right now.

Nearby, just outside of town, thanks to the efforts of the Estes Valley Watershed Coalition, a couple of ambitious engineers have settled in.

Beavers have had a rough time in recent history in this valley.

Not far from this place, several years ago, when we filmed "Rivers of the Rockies," there was a very successful established colony.

After several days of solid rain, the climate-triggered flood of 2013 wiped them out.

So what about the beavers?

So persecuted by humans for over a century because of their construction skills, after being driven to near extinction for their pelts, now being celebrated by ecological scientists for their ability to rejuvenate a watershed, protected and encouraged in places like this meadow in the national park, where fencing diverts, or prevents, elk and ever-growing numbers of moose from devouring every last willow.

This success is being duplicated on a major scale on the west side of the divide, in the Valley of the Coyote, the Kawuneeche.

Extensive work has begun to restore the proper development of the very headwaters of the Colorado River.

The Ute and the Arapaho call this Kawuneeche "the Valley of the Coyote."

And it certainly still is the home of the coyote.

But what's changed over the years are the biological alterations to this amazing and critical riparian ecosystem.

When I first began documenting this park, in the early 1990s, the Kawuneeche was a relatively diverse ecosystem.

Some tall willows grew in proximity to scattered ponds and a marshy meadow, where Beaver Creek was finding its way to the main channel of the Colorado River.

Elk were common and moose were present, but an intermittent sight for eager-eyed travelers.

Now the moose are common and the tall willows are sparse, with scarcely a beaver to be found.

National Park scientists are now working on a daunting task to re-establish a healthy riparian system following years of overgrazing by large herds of elk.

a newly exploding population of moose, and a very well-disputed shortage of predators.

-Kawuneeche Valley Restoration Collaborative is a consortium of about seven different partners that all have the aim to try to restore ecosystem function in the Kawuneeche Valley, in the headwaters of the Colorado River in Rocky Mountain National Park.

-Previously, the Kawuneeche Valley, circa 1920, was comprised of a tall-willow/beaver-pond matrix that pretty much spanned the entire valley.

We know, since about 1999 and onwards, in the last few decades, that we've pretty much lost the tall-willow/beaver system in the Kawuneeche Valley.

-For a good part of the last century, this valley had been suffering from degradation as a result of overgrazing.

Elk have been here for a long time, competing with beavers for a once-thick growth of willows.

Here, the willow destruction we witnessed with Gary on the east side has been exponentially compounded by the somewhat-controversial moose.

-Wildlife has been a real large driver in the trajectory of the vegetation in this valley.

Elk's diet tends to be roughly 60% willow, whereas a moose's diet tends to be 90% willow.

Moose have been introduced in the late 1970s by Colorado Parks and Wildlife, primarily for hunting, and we have seen them move into the park more recently in higher numbers and historically have only been known as a transient population here, not a reproductive population.

So that change has really put increased pressure on the willow vegetation that we have in the park.

So, as you can see here, it is easily used as food by both elk and moose.

And you can even see some of the chew marks that are on the end of these willows.

And so without exclosures as a restoration treatment, we really don't see a likelihood of getting tall willow back here anytime soon.

-Introduced outside of the park for hunters, moose rapidly found their way into this nearly perfect salad bar with no hunters.

-Presently, we're still researching the number of moose, getting a population estimate, but also where they're going, where they're utilizing habitat.

We've seen, from our collar tracking and observations, that moose are in every drainage of the park currently.

They're having an effect on some of our riparian ecosystems.

-This landscape was once riddled with beavers and dams and their ponds.

And you can still see remnants of those old beaver dams and ponds across this landscape.

-Without beavers, we don't really have constant workers working on dams in the valley, like beavers naturally do.

-Beavers need willows for food, dams, and shelter.

-I am standing on a relic beaver pond.

When beavers were active here, they were using mud and woody debris.

And you can even see, you know, former woody deposits that they used to build their dam here.

-The perfect storm of competition, overgrazing, and invasive vegetation has altered the environment to the point where beavers were no longer welcome and able to contribute to a balance for a healthy marshland or riparian zone.

-We're just upstream of one of our simulated beaver structures, which is comprised of untreated cedar lumber.

A week ago, this was just mostly a trickle of water, and now we have a few feet deep of water retention upstream of the structure.

Our ultimate goal is that beavers will come in and adopt our structures.

Beavers continuously work.

We're doing our work with 6 or 12 people at a time working on each on each structure, but beavers are definitely the more ideal candidate for this job.

-It's fascinating to see these dedicated humans reconstructing a complex life zone from what they learn from beavers.

What they are doing here is to basically alter it back and do so while the climate is still conducive to healthy willow growth.

-The Kawuneeche Valley has already experienced about a 5-degree warming in temperature over the last 100 years, and we're expecting an additional 5 degrees over the next 50 years of warming.

If we don't take intervention now to restore these systems, we might not have an opportunity to do so in the future, under that future expected climate.

We have the chance to resist that change and keep the communities intact that we have here in the park.

If we accepted this and said, "Hey, we're too late, we're going to let this turn to a grass system," we would have lost all of that biodiversity that's associated with riparian areas.

And so the park and the collaborative said, "We want to maintain that system like it was.

Let's do these interventions."

-Yeah.

-Like, we've been planning and dealing with this, and now to see it come to fruition is incredible.

-It's a real pleasure to be able to work here.

Previously, I did my PhD mostly in Rocky Mountain National Park, and now it's been a real treat to continue to be in these systems to botanize and nerd out on the plants in these riparian areas that are pretty unique.

And I've been expanding my world past plants and getting into birding and sitting on the river and just enjoying it.

-So, this is the Colorado River now attempting to head west to face a multitude of use disputes and interruptions even before it leaves the western foothills.

[ Rattling, clanging ] [ Water babbling ] Before it disappears into controversy and overuse, I can accept one more gift from my generous friend Rio, Colorado.

I'm just like, look-- I'm mesmerized by the height of the canyon walls here.

It's like Colorado's got such variety.

You know, people think of the plains, the Front Plains, and then they think of the mountains.

And then we got this.

-They're biting now.

-A bit of primitive self-indulgence helps to feed my passion for preservation.

Whoo-hoo!

-Hey.

[ Laughs ] Another nice one, huh?

[ Fire crackling ] -From the river to the tundra, if preservation is a goal, recreation is a catalyst.

If recreation is a catalyst, awareness is a purpose.

-How do we connect visitors from all over the world here at Rocky Mountain National Park to this?

I believe that we connect it through, including people, into the story of the human interaction within nature.

And when we see that light bulb go off in someone's eye, you know, that little glisten of realization of the importance of this area, that is that moment that they feel connected and that is what is magic to me.

-Here, they come and they see it and feel it.

That's what I'm getting from you -- they feel that.

And then they can relate better to the situation of climate change.

-I think of our little cousins, those tiny little pikas, and when I go up to Rock Cut and I watch them and I hear them chirping and I see them running around those rocks... -[ Squeaks ] -...I love them and I see them and I want to protect them.

And how do we protect the beauty of that majestic little being and that majestic little animal?

And the way that we protect it is by protecting the ecosystem and by protecting their habitat.

Once they continue going to the top because the world's getting hotter, they're not going to have any other place to go.

They're going to peak out up at the top, and then that's it.

How do we protect them?

How do we protect the most fragile of the creatures in order for them to survive?

Because they are also a healthy part of the ecosystem, too.

[ Water rushing ] -Calypso Cascades, a melodic name for one of the most memorable views in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Call us the caretakers -- until now, the passive ones.

Passive doesn't cut it any longer.

Who are and what are the individuals and organizations we support?

We've spoken of passion.

There is passion in the union of science and philosophy... in recreation and responsibility.

In the world where media negatively dominates our input and output, the power of preservation takes us to the inner peace of responsibility.

-When people say, "Look at these polls," and it says, you know, people are worried about immigration, they're worried about the economy, they're worried about wars, climate change is way down here at the bottom.

It's because they're asking the wrong question.

Because if you are concerned about all of those things, you're concerned about climate change, because it is a threat multiplier for every one of them.

-[ Honks ] -The animals that need those cool subsurface spaces are not getting them anymore.

It also means that when water percolates through the rocks, gets down into the soils, it's not as cold now down there as it used to be.

It doesn't become ice as often as it used to.

We don't get a deep freeze every winter, we're not going to have permafrost, we're not going to have seasonal ices as much as we used to.

If we lose our subsurface-water resources, they're gone forever.

-[ Squeaks ] -I'm particularly heartbroken to see 19-, 20-year-old kids who come to my classes have been hearing about this problem all their lives.

Since they were 5 years old, they heard about climate change.

Many of those kids were 15 at the beginning of the pandemic, when the world shut down.

These are traumatized people that are worried about their future.

And I want to tell them it doesn't have to be that way.

It doesn't have to be doom and gloom, unless we let it be that way, that we have a chance to change the trajectory of that story, to make our own story, to make it a story about opportunity and resilience rather than doom and gloom.

What we have to do is to stop setting carbon on fire.

[ Water rushing ] [ Water babbling ] -My feelings about water go back to who I am as a person, and who I am as a person is Tsistsistas.

So, I'm Northern Cheyenne.

My family is originally from Montana.

We consider water as sacred, literally as a sacrament.

And we see it growing up.

We see it in our ceremonies.

We see the importance of it.

For our medicine-lodge ceremony, people that are praying for us and the renewal of the Earth, they suffer for four days and four nights.

And when they are done with that, they're gifted a drink of water after four days without.

So it's a sacrament.

-The original, indigenous caretakers found a balance in the wilderness, perhaps understood by the first mountain men and women only seeking survival.

An understanding burned by the fires of ambition.

The wild beings, rapidly, were disappearing, saved only by the instinct to survive.

Can we, the visitors, the guests, change a trajectory?

Accelerated global warming is not a natural phenomenon.

It is a destructive, inadvertent, human-caused pattern.

No blame to be assigned, just corrections to be made.

Can we do this?

I will refer to a friend in Alaska.

"Once while driving from Fairbanks to Anchorage in an impossible storm, I asked a man in a well-worn pickup truck, 'Can I drive south?'

His answer?

'You can if you want to.'"

Can we do this?

We can if we want to.

-[ Bugles ] -Funding for "Water: The Sacred Gift" has been provided by... ...dedicated to preservation of our natural environment.

Additional funding provided by Visit Estes Park -- prioritizing destination stewardship and helping to inspire reverence in Estes Park and its surrounding land.

VisitEstesPark.com.

-To watch and learn more about this film and other Nick Moll documentaries, visit rockymountainchannel.com or download the app.