The Katrina Blair Legacy Project
Preserving the life, teachings, and ecological legacy of Katrina Blair.
A living archive. A future documentary.
The Katrina Blair Legacy Project is an ongoing documentary and archival initiative dedicated to preserving the life, work, teachings, and impact of Katrina Blair. Through in-depth interviews with the people who knew her, documentation of the places and communities she shaped, and the gathering of existing photographs, recordings, writing, and archival material, the project will create a lasting record of Katrina’s extraordinary relationship with the natural world and the people around her.
The first phase of the project is focused on preservation: recording these stories while the people who carry them are still here to tell them, and safeguarding material that might otherwise be lost with time. This living archive will also become the foundation for a future documentary film exploring Katrina’s life, philosophy, environmental work, and enduring influence in the San Juan Mountains and beyond.
Who was Katrina Blair?
Katrina Blair was an herbalist, wild food educator, author, environmentalist, and the founder of Turtle Lake Refuge in Durango, Colorado. She spent decades teaching people how to recognize, eat, care for, and live in closer relationship with the plants growing around them.
She was also a deeply woven part of the community that formed around the Telluride Mushroom Festival, where her knowledge, curiosity, and way of moving through the natural world made her a beloved presence. For many people, Katrina was not just a teacher. She was a friend, a guide, a collaborator, and someone who brought people together.
Through Turtle Lake Refuge, her classes and books, the Mushroom Festival, and the many friendships she built over the years, Katrina created a community rooted in reciprocity, wild food, ecological care, and a sense of wonder about the living world.
The Katrina Blair Legacy Project is an effort to preserve that fuller picture of who she was. Not only her work, but the stories people carry about her, the communities she helped shape, and the way her presence changed how others understood the land around them.
A living Legacy
Katrina’s legacy lives not only in what she created, but in the people she changed. Her knowledge of wild foods, ecology, community, and place was something she shared freely, passing what she learned into the lives of the people around her.
The Katrina Blair Legacy Project asks what happens to that knowledge after a person is gone. Through archival footage of Katrina and new conversations with the people who knew her, the film will trace the ways her ideas continue through stories, practices, relationships, and the community she helped shape.
This project is not only about preserving memory. It is about understanding legacy as something living: knowledge passed from one person to another, transformed through experience, practiced, and carried forward.
At its heart, this is a film about what it means to live well, care for one another, and protect the places that make our lives possible.
What the Film Will Include
The film will bring together archival footage of Katrina with new interviews from the people who knew, loved, and learned from her.
Through their stories, and through the places and practices that shaped Katrina’s life, the film will explore how her knowledge and influence continue to live within the community.
The Katrina Blair Legacy Project began with a sense of urgency. So much of Katrina’s story still lives in the memories of the people who knew her, worked alongside her, learned from her, and shared a community with her. Those stories are incredibly valuable, but they are also fragile.
This first phase of the project is focused on recording those voices while there is still time to do it well. The goal is to sit down with the people who were closest to Katrina and preserve not only what she accomplished, but what it felt like to know her, learn from her, and build a life and community alongside her.
By creating these interviews now, alongside photographs, recordings, writing, and other archival material, the project can begin building a lasting record of Katrina’s life and the community around her. That archive can stand on its own as a preservation effort while also becoming the foundation for a larger documentary film in the future.
Why Now?
Support the Project
The Katrina Blair Legacy Project is currently in its first phase, focused on recording and preserving interviews, stories, photographs, archival materials, and the places connected to Katrina’s life and work.
Support for the project will help cover the practical costs of doing this work carefully, including travel throughout the Telluride and Durango area, camera and sound equipment, crew, data storage and backups, archival collection, transcription, and post-production.
Every contribution helps make it possible to preserve these stories with the care they deserve and to begin building the foundation for a future documentary film.
If you are interested in supporting the project financially, contributing archival material, sharing a story about Katrina, or connecting us with someone we should speak with, please get in touch.
Fundraising campaign coming soon.