Outdoor Allies : Teal Lehto

Ever wondered how you can do more for public lands but you aren’t sure where to start? Outdoor Alliance’s Outdoor Allies series explores how other outdoor adventurers got their start in advocacy work and their advice for how you can harness your passion for the outdoors into advocacy for the land and water you love. Teal Lehto is a water rights activist in Colorado and the founder of Western Water Girl, a social media account that educates people on water conservation in the Colorado River Basin.

What do you like to do outside and how did you first get connected to the outdoors?

I love rafting, snowboarding, mountain biking, hiking, and camping, and I'm currently teaching myself how to fish. My family has been camping on the banks of the Dolores River for as long as I can remember. One of our first camping trips was when I was two years old and we've been going to the same campsite for nearly two decades now. I’ve seen the river in a lot of different states because of that. As a kid I never really understood why some years the river was raging, while other years it was just a trickling stream. That canyon holds a lot of spiritual and personal significance to me because I feel like it's where I was able to be myself. As a kid, I loved rolling around in the mud catching frogs and bugs, and the Dolores gave me the space to do those activities.

As a result of your love for water and riparian environments, you ended up at Fort Lewis College, where you majored in environmental studies. While in college you also started a club dedicated to water resource issues, which led you to raft racing. How did that club come to be?

The club I started was called H2 Work. We had about 40 members, and we would do tours of dams, wastewater treatment facilities, and we had a speaker series with folks from Trout Unlimited, Colorado Parks, and biologists. In 2017, I founded a raft racing team that went on to win the U.S. National Rafting Championship. We ended up representing the United States at the World Rafting Championships in Japan and the World Cup invitational events in China in 2018.

That’s when things kind of culminated for me. I realized that my life had been guided by the rivers I was near or floating on, and that I needed to take the skills I had gained to protect these places because they were important to me and my personal development, and I thought they could be for others too.

You were in Colorado during the Gold King Mine spill–how did that affect your trajectory in advocacy?

That day I got a phone call from a friend, and she was like, “You're gonna have to get your rafts off the water, something is happening.” What happened was the EPA was trying to clean up the Gold King Mine in Colorado, and they accidentally breached a dam. The whole mine just drained into the Animes River. It was three million gallons of toxic sludge, and it turned the Animes a bright orange. The imagery that came out was crazy and it got national attention. I learned after that there's over 20,000 active abandoned minds throughout the West, and many of them are polluting our water resources.

The Gold King Mine spill is such a unique microcosm, because yes, it was such a catastrophic event, but it also made our river community come together, and that was inspiring to watch. The fisherman came together with the rafters, and the farmers came together with the state officials, and they came up with a recovery plan and ways to protect our river in the future.

The Animas River eventually merges with the San Juan River. And the San Juan River is where Navajo Nation gets their water. Unfortunately, they were not notified of the spill before it reached them. That water was used on their crops, and that in my opinion is probably the biggest loss from that whole disaster.

You now run a popular social media account called Western Water Girl, where you educate the general public about water policy, and protecting public lands. What made you want to start it?

I started my platform because I really wanted to get involved in water conservation in person, and in my community. I was repeatedly told that I needed to wait my turn, that I needed more degrees, that I was naive. I got this answer quite frequently, and I became frustrated. One day I put a poll up on my Instagram where I was like, should I start a podcast or a TikTok? I had already been talking about water policy and land conservation on my social media. Somebody reached out and said, “A podcast would be cool but all you need for a TikTok is your phone.”

I had just gotten a rejection letter for another volunteer position I applied to, and I was really pissed off about it. I picked up my phone and made my first video about climate anxiety, about the way that we manage water in the West, and the intense changes we’re seeing. I didn't expect anybody to watch it. It got 200,000 views in one day, and I was like, wow, I am onto something here.

Since then, your channel on TikTok has grown, you’ve started posting similar material to Instagram, and the work that you’re doing was picked up by NPR. You’re right, you were onto something! What are your aspirations for Western Water Girl, and how do you chart the path forward?

Yeah, from there my platform skyrocketed! I’ve now been interviewed by the BBC and PBS. I attended the Colorado River Water User Association conference, which is the largest stakeholder meeting in the Colorado River Basin, and I spoke about messaging in a water-stressed world.

The most surprising thing to me about this adventure I’m on is that nobody knows what to do with me, because I'm doing something that people haven't really imagined as viable! It’s a different pathway to creating change. So, I struggle with how to gain legitimacy, while also kind of just figuring it out as I go. I believe that in the next ten or so years, what I’m doing will not be uncommon. There will be a whole generation of influencers working towards creating the change they want to see in the world. I also hope that in the future, I get to be that mentor to other people that are speaking up for the issues that mean the most to them.

What advocacy issue has you fired up right now, and how can people get involved?

I'm currently focused on the large coalition effort to protect the Dolores River. The Dolores Canyon Country as a potential national monument is really close to my heart because that landscape is what made me who I am today, and it’s what drew me into the work I'm doing now. Our country is rapidly running out of wild spaces for young people to be free in and I think it's so important as a young person to have those wild open spaces to explore, to discover who you are.

Lightning Round:

Favorite close to home spot: Junction Creek trail in Durango, CO.

Favorite book: I am a voracious reader! Anything by Craig Childs or Heather Hansman. Thinking Like a Watershed by Jack and Celestia Loeffler is a dense but important read, and I also love some of the YA fiction books by Will Hobbes, which take place in the Durango area.

Another Advocate I admire: Dani Reyes-Acosta, she inspires me to take a deeper look at the issues our mountain towns are facing and how to relate to the outdoors in a non-extractive way. I would be remiss if I didn't also mention Connor Ryan and Len Necefer, from Natives Outdoors.