Got drinking water?

Kelly Gallo, who is a science and environment teacher at Soldier Hollow Charter School, helped her students found the festival in conjunction with Utah State Parks so the students could better learn about their local environment. The festival is one of many activities held under the auspices of the Provo River Institute, a program started by the school with a $10,000 grant from Wild Gift, a non-profit organization based in Idaho that gives grants to young community leaders who design projects that promote wildlands stewardship and the development of sustainable communities.

Gallo said she is using the money and the Provo River Institute to help her students get hands-on experience working to understand their backyard environment. The work is part of a new philosophy called place-based education. In addition to creating the festival to draw attention to how much of the Wasatch Front's drinking water is provided by the Provo River, her students also study land use, snowmelt and population trends among sandhill cranes and killdeer, to name a few projects.

Megan Mounteer, 12, of Heber City, is one of Gallo's students. She said creating the festival was important so the public "can learn how to conserve water and how to treat animals."

Jackie McLaughlan of Midway is the mother of Brandon, one of Gallo's students. She volunteered to help her son's class with the festival.

"As a parent, we are eventually going to turn this earth over to our children, and we want it to be in better shape when we do," she said of her reason for supporting the festival.

Since becoming a student at Soldier Hollow, which focuses on the environment, her son has begun to recycle without being asked and even rides his bike to school to help reduce vehicle pollution.

Mitch Butterfield and Star Coulbrooke drove two hours from Smithfield to attend the festival after seeing it advertised in an Idaho newspaper. The pair founded their own festival at the Oneida Narrows on the Bear River last year as a way of protesting a proposed dam there and said they came to the Provo River Watershed Festival to see how other people were running similar festivals.

Both their own festival and Saturday's festival are part of a trend of river festivals popping up around the nation, they said. More and more people are beginning to pay attention to rivers, wanting to protect and preserve them by getting the public to pay more attention to them.

Kathy Donnell, park naturalist at Jordanelle State Park, said the festival helps students and adults alike learn more about what a watershed is, where the Provo River comes from, and how human land use affects drinking water and the river ecosystem.

"We need to take care of it for each other," she said of the river watershed. "We get so disconnected from the natural world, we don't understand where water or food comes from. This festival reconnects us back to nature. We can't survive without nature, and we need to take care of it."

Visitors at the festival had the opportunity to canoe, hike and visit booths from sponsors ranging from Utah's Hogle Zoo to the Wildlife Protection Society to the International Dutch Oven Society.