There were moments when Jennifer Mahl wondered whether they could get down the river at all. The Gila was running low, perhaps 100 cubic feet per second, and Mahl and her companions frequently found themselves outside their specially-built boats, dragging and pulling them through shallow water.
Mahl had kayaked on lakes before, but never attempted anything like this. Now she was navigating one of the Southwest's last free-flowing rivers while a documentary film crew recorded the experience.
“It was extremely difficult, at the very edge of my capabilities,” Mahl said. “(But) Every once in a while you'd get those dream moments where you're just paddling along and you're in a spot that no one else is. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing.”
For Mahl and the two women making the journey with her, however, this was about much more than navigating a wild river. They were following a path their children had left for them.
Mahl's son, Michael Sebastian Mahl, and friends Ella Jaz Kirk and Ella Sala Myers were sophomores at Aldo Leopold Charter School in Silver City when they died in a plane crash May 23, 2014. The three were members of the school's ecological monitoring team and were conducting aerial research connected to the Signal Peak Fire in the Gila National Forest when the plane crashed.
They were teenagers, but their connection to the Gila River and the surrounding environment had already become an important part of their lives. According to his mother, that connection began almost as soon as Michael was old enough to explore the world around him.
“Whether it was little bugs or birds or animals or water, he was just very aesthetic and nature loving,” Mahl said.
Then he found Ella and Ella.
“The three of them just were a power team,” Mahl said. “They just hit it off. They all had similar interests and drives.”
At Aldo Leopold Charter School, being selected for the ecological monitoring team carried a certain status.
“It's like being the quarterback on the football team of most public schools,” Mahl said.
The teenagers monitored forests and watersheds, including areas along the Gila, and shared what they learned with younger students. Ella Kirk took her involvement a step further, publicly speaking out against a proposed diversion of the Gila River, appearing at meetings and hearings as part of a long-running debate over the river's future.
Todd Schulke, a longtime Gila conservation advocate and later a co-producer of the film, remembers Ella speaking at public meetings and traveling to Santa Fe to make her case at a congressional hearing. When the three teenagers died, Schulke said, the loss reverberated well beyond their families.
“We just lost these warriors,” he remembered thinking.
In the years that followed, the question became how to honor them and how to continue something they had started.
Finding a story in the loss
The beginnings of what eventually became Journey Down the Gila came from an unlikely place. Filmmaker David Garcia had initially become acquainted with the families through legal proceedings that followed the crash. He had conducted interviews and produced video connected to the case.
When those proceedings were over, the families, Schulke and Garcia began talking about whether something meaningful could grow from the footage and relationships created under such tragic circumstances.
“We thought, wouldn't it be good if we could do something meaningful now?” said Patrice Mutchnick, Ella Kirk's mother and a co-producer of the film.
Two ideas began to converge. There was a desire to tell the story of three children whose lives had ended much too soon. And there was the Gila River, a place the teenagers had known, studied and wanted to protect.
“We decided to do a film about the kids and the Gila River together to elevate their message and to bring meaning to their lives and their deaths,” Mutchnick said.
But there was still a fundamental storytelling question: How do you make a movie that allows three teenagers who are no longer here to tell their story?
Garcia found his answer in their mothers.
“To really hear these kids speak, you have to hear their parents speak about them because their parents were the closest people in the world to them,” Garcia said.
The film would follow the three mothers as they traveled down the Gila, allowing them to reflect on their children while experiencing the river that had meant so much to them. Mutchnick immediately recognized the possibilities.
“It was his idea that we tell it through the mothers,” she said. “It was kind of a brilliant idea.”
Filming began in 2017, and simply getting a film crew down the Gila proved to be a story of its own. The river's unpredictable flows made scheduling difficult. Garcia remembers watching weather systems off Baja California, wondering whether enough rain might fall to raise the river to a level that would allow the crew to make another trip.
Boats were specially designed for the Gila's low water. Special permission was needed to conduct the filming in the wilderness. Garcia estimates he made the journey four or five times during the principal filming period. The result captures something Garcia believes many Americans have never experienced.
“The concept of a wild river is foreign to most Americans,” he said.
Most rivers people encounter, Garcia said, have been controlled somewhere upstream by dams or other infrastructure. The Gila offered something different, including all the difficulties that came with trying to take mothers, boats, cameras and a film crew through it.
For Mutchnick, the physical journey became part of an emotional one.
“It's painful to talk about the loss and the death and the tragedy itself,” she said, “but it's very healing to be able to reflect on your child's life and to give their life and their death meaning.”
It was an opportunity, she realized, that many grieving parents never receive.
“The fact that we get to elevate our children's lives to support something they loved so much,” Mutchnick said, “it was a privilege and an honor.”
The resulting film is neither simply a conservation documentary nor solely a story about three children who died. It is both, while also becoming a story about grief.
“Usually you see these films and they're journey films,” Mutchnick said. “But you very rarely see a grieving mom in one.”
A journey that continued
The mothers' journey did not end when they stepped out of the Gila. It eventually carried them across the country to Washington, D.C., where they advocated for federal protection of the river their children had loved. For Mutchnick, getting there required another unusual journey.
“After the accident, I don't fly,” she said.
So, the mothers traveled east by train, a trip that also became part of the documentary. Schulke accompanied them and remembers a journey filled with the same seemingly contradictory emotions that had accompanied them on the river — grief and joy, loss and purpose.
In Washington, the mothers met with members of New Mexico's congressional delegation and advocated for federal Wild and Scenic designation for portions of the Gila and its tributaries. The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, adopted by Congress in 1968, created a mechanism to preserve selected rivers with significant scenic, recreational, wildlife, historic, cultural and other values in a free-flowing condition.
For decades, conservationists and others have debated proposals to dam or divert portions of the Gila. A major effort to develop a diversion under provisions of the Arizona Water Settlements Act eventually collapsed after years of controversy. Advocates then increasingly turned their attention toward permanent Wild and Scenic protection.
The M.H. Dutch Salmon Greater Gila Wild and Scenic River Act was first introduced in Congress in 2020, not long after the mothers' Washington trip and the film's initial limited screenings in 2019. The proposal would designate more than 400 miles of the Gila watershed, including portions of the Gila and San Francisco rivers and tributaries, for protection under the federal Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.
The legislation has yet to become law. It was introduced again in Congress in 2025, giving the film renewed relevance and prompting another round of community screenings, including the upcoming showing at the Rio Grande Theatre in Las Cruces.
Schulke said the unresolved legislation is one reason they continue showing a film whose origins now stretch back nearly a decade. But for Mahl, the advocacy has become about more than legislation, and even more than honoring Michael.
Before her son's death, she said, she wasn't particularly political and hadn't given much thought to becoming involved in a fight over federal river protections. Michael changed that.
“It started as just a way to honor my son,” Mahl said.
Then she began learning more about the river and the decades-long debates surrounding its future.
“It just got into my soul,” she said, “and it became my cause.”
Protecting what they loved
Journey Down the Gila was first shown publicly in 2019 but has never received broad commercial distribution. The film is now being revisited as work continues toward a completed version for commercial release under the title Hearts of the Gila, the name used in its current trailer.
Twelve years have passed since Michael Mahl, Ella Kirk and Ella Myers climbed aboard an airplane to study a landscape they had already come to care deeply about. They never returned.
Their mothers, who in some cases barely knew one another before that day, eventually found themselves together in boats on the Gila River, then aboard a train crossing the country, and finally in the halls of Washington advocating for something their children had believed was worth protecting.
For Schulke, the film ultimately carries a message that extends beyond one river or one tragedy. People should protect the things they love, he said, because they can never be certain how long they will have them.
For the mothers, that lesson came at an unimaginable cost. But the journey gave them an opportunity to preserve something of what Michael, Ella and Ella left behind. Garcia said that became the central purpose of the film.
“We want to honor the kids' voices,” he said, “and let them speak.”
