Colorado River megadrought got you down? Feel hope with TikTok's 'WesternWaterGirl'
DURANGO, Colo. — Teal Lehto honed her short, snappy explanations of the West's complex water problems guiding rafting trips down the Animas River in her hometown of Durango.
She often had lulls of a minute or less in between shouting paddle commands to the tourists in her boat — squeezing in a tidy explanation of how water rights work before yelling "all forward" to her boatmates to keep them from ramming into rocks.
After running the same stretch of river a few times a day for months, the timing became second nature.
"You get to the point where you're like, 'OK, I know I'm going to need to call a command in exactly 45 seconds. Like, what story can I tell in the meantime?' " Lehto said while sitting along the Animas on a rainy August morning.
"I'll tell you, the better stories you tell, the better tips you get," she said.
That same formula works on TikTok,
