UW Graduate Students A River Out of Time To Be Screened Oct. 15 in Laramie

“A River Out of Time,” a film that examines the current water crisis of the Colorado River Basin while following the 150th anniversary expedition of John Wesley Powell’s first exploration of the Green and Colorado rivers, will be screened at 7 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 15, at the Gryphon Theatre in Laramie. The screening is free and open to the public.

University of Wyoming graduate student Ben Kraushaar, from Durango, Colo., directed the 64-minute film with Cody Perry, co-founder and filmmaker of Rig To Flip, a media company specializing in stories about the Colorado River Basin’s land, water and people.

“A River Out of Time” stems from the 2019 Sesquicentennial Colorado River Exploring Expedition (SCREE) project that featured a 70-day rafting trip to commemorate Powell’s famous 1869 expedition down the Green and Colorado rivers. Powell’s initial three-month trip was the first investigation of long segments of the rivers and the first recorded European passage through the entirety of the Grand Canyon.

UW Department of Geology and Geophysics Professor Tom Minckley and a collective group of artists, authors, conservationists and scholars, who engaged with citizens along the Colorado River corridor to consider visions for the future of the region, led the SCREE project. Kraushaar was one of Minckley’s graduate students and a member of SCREE.

SCREE provided a platform to engage local communities, stakeholders and tribes extending 1,000 miles from Green River in southwest Wyoming to Lake Mead, Ariz.

Kraushaar and Perry’s film has been accepted into several regional film festivals throughout the Colorado River Basin, with screenings in Kanab, Salt Lake City, Vernal and Green River, Utah; Grand Junction and Durango, Colo.; and Flagstaff, Ariz.

“It is our goal to provide you with an honest examination of the Colorado River Basin through the lens of an extraordinary journey through the heart of the West,” they say. “Our trip provided a platform for dialogue between diverse people and communities with varying views and connections to the Colorado River and its tributaries.”

Their “adrenaline-pumping, rapid-running adventure film” focuses on the complexities of the basin and provides viewers with an assessment of what the future may hold for the nation’s most important resource -- water -- and the communities and ecosystems that depend on it.

A question-and-answer session follows the screening of the film.

As part of a program earlier in the day, a river cleanup volunteer project is planned to pick up trash along the Laramie River Greenbelt. Volunteers will meet at Optimist Park at 8:30 a.m., and participants are asked to bring their own gloves and to wear sturdy shoes.

For more information, email Minckley at minckley@uwyo.edu.