When the Platte Basin Timelapse project first began, Bob Kuzelka of Lincoln Friends of Chamber Music approached PBT’s co-founders, Mike Forsberg and Mike Farrell, with the idea of someday putting the time-lapse imagery to chamber music. Several years later, that idea became a reality and Time and the River was created. The world premiere of Time and the […]

I was born and raised in Aurora, Nebraska, with the seemingly inherent knowledge that the Platte River was the closest and one of the most important water features of our community. Throughout the years, I went on school field trips to the Platte where we would talk about the significance of the water system so […]

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 […]

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. […]

As an elementary-school-age Nebraskan, Michelle Kwan’s 2002 Olympic run remained my exclusive exposure to ice skating. Hearing of a small pond close to my grandparents’ Colorado home induced wonder beyond previous possibilities in my young life. I waited impatiently for our Christmas trip to their home on Wisp Creek Drive. My dad, as tall as […]

In June, a small team of PBT interns set out for the highest point in the Platte Basin watershed. We had big intentions of catching 5-star media to fill in cracks for the Grays Peak scene in the upcoming PBT documentary featuring Mike and Pete’s 55-day, 1,300-mile journey across the watershed. Grays Peak is the highest point in the Platte Basin […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]

Earlier this summer I drove a 1,756 mile loop up, down and around the edges of a tilted tabletop in the heart of North America. Born high in the Colorado Rockies, the Platte River Basin loses 12,000 feet in elevation west to east, draining 90,000 square miles across the plains until it flows into the […]