Flowing Into the Future
3rd Annual Gila River Festival Scheduled for September 2007

The 3rd Annual Gila River Festival, scheduled for September 13-16, is a weekend celebration and interpretive event focusing on increasing the awareness of the natural and cultural history of the Gila River. Featuring talks, walks, stewardship projects and performance, this year’s event also features an evening session of thematic campfires with storytellers, a “star party,” and an opportunity for families to camp at the Gila Cliff Dwellings.

The theme for the festival this year is “Flowing Into the Future” and will emphasize the role of flooding in maintaining the natural integrity of the river, and the cyclical nature that people living alongside it must adapt to.

Planning for the 3rd annual event began with a debriefing and “lessons learned” session with key players from the 2nd annual event. The planning committee began meeting in February 2007. Festival planners will host an orientation for presenters, featuring a workshop on presentation skills and integration of the festival theme.

The festival begins Thursday, September 13, with day trips with naturalists and cultural history specialists to areas of interest, and officially kicks-off Thursday evening with an address from our keynote speaker, Tom Fleischner, conservation biologist and author of Desert Wetlands.

More day trips are planned for Friday, September 14, including a trip led by The Nature Conservancy naturalist Mike Fugagli to discuss the role of flooding on the ecological community of the Cliff-Gila valley. Friday evening, the Southwest New Mexico Audubon Society and Gila Native Plant Society will jointly present “From Mountains to Desert: The Gila River Corridor’s Plants, Birds and Wildlife.”

Saturday morning will include a parade through downtown Silver City featuring locally constructed and thematic puppets. Local puppet makers will take the opportunity to introduce a new set of river otter puppets to the community, complementing their existing flood puppets. The river otter puppets are especially timely as the New Mexico Game Commission recently approved reintroduction of these lively critters to two waterways in the state – the Upper Gila and the Upper Rio Grande rivers. This puppet parade will provide an opportunity to reintroduce the idea of river otter back into the hearts and minds of the local community, reinforce the cyclical nature of flooding, and provide an opportunity for visual and performing artists to integrate with what is typically a science dominated process. Following the parade, folks will settle in at a local park for a puppet skit adapted from the children’s story The Little Creek, an inspiring tale of how a Southwest river was formed, then abused, and finally restored.

Saturday evening, the festival environ will shift to the Gila Cliff Dwellings
National Monument, located about 45 miles north of Silver City. An evening campfire program will feature storytellers, a “star party,” and an opportunity for families to camp out under the stars in the headwaters of the Gila River.

Sunday morning will dawn with a birding trip, and various walks and talks with experts. Food, music and demonstrations by experts will round out the activities. Festival attendees will have the opportunity to turn inspiration into action through stewardship activities, including a campground cleanup and trail restoration work.

Volunteering for the Gila River Festival is a great way to spend time with old and new friends. And you’ll get to work with some of the area’s real movers and shakers. Some of the volunteer positions are: salespeople, greeters, parking attendants, registration helpers, logistics people, folks to set up and clean up, MCs, refreshment servers, and more.

For more information on volunteering, please contact Donna Stevens at 388-5296.

For more information on the overall festival, or for other ways to get involved, call Melanie Gasparich at 535-2519.