22 Nebraskaland • June 2019
Q: Long before Follow the Water
was created, you and Michael
Farrell cofounded the Platte
Basin Timelapse project,
which documents changes in
the Platte River watershed.
How did you decide to also
explore the watershed through
a documentary film?
We've had the Platte Basin Timelapse
project in place since 2011, and that
project is a long-form, multimedia
documentary that really doesn't have an
end to it. Its goal is to get people to think
about where their water comes from and
what it means to live in a watershed
today. We have all these time-lapse
cameras that we've put in place from
mountains to plains in our watershed;
each one is a different chapter in the
story of that water, and each one has a
story to tell.
I got to a point where I wanted
to do something that would connect
some of these time-lapse cameras from
mountains to plains through a personal
experience, and I started to talk about
that with Pete Stegen. We decided
to tell a longer story about traveling
through a watershed, starting from
the very farthest away a drop of water
comes from, and eventually finding our
way back to the drain. I drew up the
initial plan on the back of a Subway
napkin.
Q: What planning and
preparation was necessary for
the trip?
We first lined up our own schedules,
Pete and I, to know what blocks of time
Follow the Water is a 55-minute documentary about a journey
taken by two men through the Platte River watershed. The
fi lm allows audiences to travel along with conservation
photographer Mike Forsberg and fi lmmaker Pete Stegen as
they discover where our water comes from. Follow the Water
can currently be viewed at pbs.org/show/follow-water.
In the following interview, Mike Forsberg talks about how
and why this documentary was created, what the journey was
like and his plans for the future.
Backpackers Pete Stegen, Lindsay Dalton, Mariah Lundgren, Kery Harrelson and
Mike Forsberg rest in an alpine meadow near Kenosha Pass above South Park,
Colorado, as they neared the end of the 17-day backpacking portion of the journey.
