The Colorado River begins quietly at La Poudre Pass Lake in the Never Summer Range in Rocky Mountain National Park.
From there, water gathers from smaller streams, moves west through mountains and canyons, and eventually becomes the river that sustains communities, farms, and ecosystems across the American Southwest.
For Estes Park filmmaker Nick Mollé, the journey raised a question that became the heart of his final film:
“What is the Colorado River trying to tell us?”
A sold-out audience gathered Monday evening, Sept. 28, at the Historic Park Theatre for the 7 p.m. premiere of “Stream of Conscience: The Colorado,” Mollé’s final documentary featuring his original writing, direction, and narration.
The evening was both a film premiere and a tribute to Mollé, the Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and longtime Estes Park conservationist who died March 18 after a battle with cancer.
Mollé was still working on the film until shortly before his death.
“We were recording narration maybe a couple of weeks before he passed away,” filmmaker Sean Doherty told the audience after the screening. “He was going to finish this movie no matter what, and we all made a promise to him. … We were going to finish this.”
They did.
The result is a visually striking journey from the Colorado River’s headwaters in Rocky Mountain National Park through Utah’s canyon country, Lake Powell, the Grand Canyon, and Lake Mead to Hoover Dam.
But “Stream of Conscience” is more than a travelogue.
It is a story about water, sediment, dams, drought, and climate change — and about the complicated relationship between a river and the millions of people whose lives depend on it.
It is also unmistakably a Nick Mollé film.
A ‘sedimental’ journey
Mollé loved wordplay.
Years earlier, while making “Rivers of the Rockies,” he described the trip as a “sentimental journey.” This time, as researchers spread out maps showing the massive deposits trapped behind Glen Canyon Dam, Mollé found another description.
A “sedimental journey.” The joke carries a serious message.
Rivers move more than water. They carry sediment that shapes river channels, rebuilds beaches, supports habitat, and sustains ecosystems.
Glen Canyon Dam interrupted that process.
Researchers with the Returning Rapids Project explain in the film how the dam slowed the Colorado and caused sediment to settle into Lake Powell. As the reservoir has receded, the river has begun cutting through those deposits and reclaiming stretches of its former corridor.
“The Colorado River is one of the most sediment-laden rivers, and we just put a dam in the middle of that,” Sam Bagge, a river researcher with Returning Rapids Project, tells Mollé. With the water slowed in the reservoir, “all that sediment drops out.”
In places once covered by Lake Powell, rapids are returning. Native vegetation is coming back. Researchers are watching the river begin to rebuild portions of an ecosystem that had been submerged.
That recovery provides one of the film’s recurring notes of hope.
“If you give her some room, she can do amazing things,” says Davide Ippolito, a Returning Rapids River Guide, describing the return of native vegetation, otters, beavers, and other life. “We don’t need to over-engineer things necessarily, but we just give her space, and everything else seems to fall in place.”
That message was echoed by Mike DeHoff, a founding member of Returning Rapids Project, “If given the chance, there are natural forces that can restore themselves at an astounding rate.”
A river with less water
The other half of the story is what is happening to the water itself.
Near the Colorado’s headwaters, the film explains that the snow season has shortened while the dry season has lengthened. Warmer air also draws more moisture from vegetation and soils.
Farther downstream, the consequences become impossible to miss.
Brad Udall, a senior water and climate researcher scientist and scholar at the Colorado Water Center, Colorado State University interviewed by Claire Mollé, says Colorado River flows have declined about 20% over roughly the past quarter-century and attributes much of that loss to human-caused warming.
Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the two largest reservoirs in the United States, were full in 2000, Udall says. By the time of the interview, he said they were headed toward less than 25% full.
The river serves seven states, two countries, and 30 tribal nations, Udall says, along with major metropolitan areas across the Southwest.
“It’s really hard to overstate just how important this water is to the American Southwest,” says Udall.
Mollé lets the landscape make the point, too.
The film returns to places he photographed more than a decade earlier. Where water once filled the frame, broad expanses of exposed sediment now stretch toward a distant river channel.
At Lake Mead, hydrologist David Kramer stands at the site of a former marina and explains that in 2000, the spot lay beneath more than 150 feet of water.
The film also challenges easy assumptions about Las Vegas, explaining how the city has reduced per-capita water use and recycles indoor water back into Lake Mead.
‘The River is speaking. Are we listening?’
Mollé was interested in more than hydrology. He wanted to know what the river meant to people.
That question takes the film to Indigenous communities whose relationship with the Colorado River and its tributaries stretches back long before dams, reservoirs, and interstate water compacts.
Crystal Tulley-Cordova, principal hydrologist for the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources, tells the filmmakers that one in three households in the Navajo Nation lacks access to clean running water. She grew up without running water herself.
“When you haul water, you really have this conscious state of how much water you’re using,” she says.
When asked what the Colorado River is trying to tell people, Tulley-Cordova gives a simple answer: “Water is life.”
But she expands the idea beyond human consumption. Water sustains plants, birds, fish, animals, insects, and the broader landscape, she says. Humans must understand themselves as part of that system, not apart from it.
The interview was especially important to Mollé, but he became too ill to conduct it. His daughter stepped in. After Monday’s screening, she held back tears as she told the audience that interviewing Tulley-Cordova was something her father “wanted to do so badly.”
“I had big shoes to fill doing that interview for my dad,” Claire Mollé said.
It would not be the only time she had to step into those shoes. As Mollé’s health declined, Claire and the rest of his filmmaking family and crew took on more of the work needed to complete the documentary. Mollé left behind notes — sometimes in his characteristically informal fashion.
“My dad liked to leave really important notes on like old napkins and pieces of trash,” Claire joked after the premiere.
Finishing Nick’s film
The Mollé family and production team had more than notes to guide them. They had spent years working alongside him.
Sisters Claire and Lauren Mollé, cinematographers and producers Sean Doherty and John Berry, and Mollé’s wife, Mary Beth, brought the project to completion. The film also includes original music created as Mollé’s health was failing.
Berry, a musician who had never played slide guitar, spoke about working with Mollé on slide guitar parts for the soundtrack during the final months of his life. Barry would record a take, then send it to Mollé, who would respond with “suggestions.”
One of Berry’s promises to Mollé, he said, was that he would “continue to play for him and make music for this movie.”
The photography is among the film’s greatest strengths.
The camera follows the Colorado from its modest beginning in the Rockies through immense red-rock landscapes and down into the Grand Canyon. Time-lapse sequences capture stars moving across the desert sky. Berry described “cowboy camping” without a tent at the bottom of the Grand Canyon to capture one of those sequences.
Yet some of the most powerful images are not grand vistas. They are comparisons.
Footage from Mollé’s earlier films shows water where sediment now lies. Reservoir shorelines have retreated. River channels have reappeared.
At the Grand Canyon, the water itself tells a story.
The clear green Colorado below Glen Canyon Dam may look beautiful, but the film explains that its clarity reflects something missing: much of the sediment that historically moved through the canyon is trapped upstream.
Without that sediment, beaches and other parts of the river ecosystem are diminished, and archaeological sites can be more vulnerable to erosion.
A promise kept
Following the screening, the production team gathered in front of the audience for questions as they all choked back tears.
Questions covered reservoir levels, Glen Canyon Dam, agriculture, conservation, and a planned sequel that will follow the Colorado beyond Lake Mead toward Mexico and examine agriculture’s enormous role in the river system.
The team plans to take “Stream of Conscience: The Colorado” to additional theaters and hopes for an Earth Day 2027 release on PBS, followed later by streaming availability.
The sequel will continue the journey toward Mexico and the Gulf of California and will include footage Mollé had already filmed, including interviews with peach growers in Palisade.
The filmmakers said they intend to continue the mission that guided Mollé’s work: conservation through education.
His daughter Lauren described the philosophy behind his films.
“He doesn’t want to preach to you,” she said. “He wanted his movies to tell a story, and he wanted them to give the truth of the facts.”
Then she shared one of her final memories of her father.
Near the end of his life, when Mollé could say little, he was still thinking about the film.
“We need to go so I can make it on time for the premiere,” she recalled him saying.
“I hope he made it on time tonight,” she told the audience. “I’m sure he did. I’m sure he was the first one here.”
For nearly an hour on screen Monday night, Mollé was there.
His voice moved with the river from the marshy headwaters of Rocky Mountain National Park into canyon country, past dams and shrinking reservoirs, asking questions along the way.
Near the end of the film, the Colorado becomes something of a metaphor for Mollé’s own final journey.
“The river still runs,” Claire narrates after completing a difficult descent into the Grand Canyon. “Much like a wounded soul, refusing to be tamed, continuing on.”
Then comes the message at the heart of her father’s final film: “Nature isn’t asking us to conquer it, but to learn to coexist.”
And one last question. “The River is speaking. Are we listening?”
The film was supported by major funders Kate Colby and the Loving Climate Foundation, the Newendorp Family Charitable Foundation Fund, the Owens, Rams Horn Village Resort, and Deborah Gibson. It can be seen at the Historic Park Theater at 1 p.m. on Wed, Oct 7, Wed, Oct 14, Wed, Oct 21, and Wed, Oct 28.
You must be logged in to post a comment.