Matt Moseley’s day job is CEO of a communications company. His night job is author of books, including one about Hunter S. Thompson. And his “early-morning job” is open-water swimmer, which is weird because he lives in landlocked Boulder County.
But Moseley knows how to find the water there and all over Colorado, even if most of it is in reservoirs.
On certain summer mornings between 6 and 7:30, he’s logging meters at Boulder Reservoir, on the roped-off loop the Boulder Aquatic Masters swim club puts in for fish like him to train for long-distance swims.
Or he’s counting strokes at Horsetooth Reservoir west of Fort Collins, always with a support boat or swimmer by his side, “because I say safety third, but really it’s safety first.”
Sometimes he’s in falsely named Carter Lake, another reservoir in Larimer County that’s 3 miles long, about 1 mile wide and surrounded by 1,000 acres of public land.
And someday in the near future, he hopes, he’ll have time for a 65-mile multiday self-supported swim down the Colorado and a 52-mile stretch of the Green, before or after he swims the Straight of Gibraltar, Catalina Island to Rancho Palos Verde, around the Island of Manhattan and across several alpine lakes in Colorado, including Jasper, Alta, Granby, Thunder, Reudi Reservoir (not a lake) “and others,” he said.
A reasonable question: Why does a terrestrial being like Moseley want to spend so much time slicing through our future drinking water?
A reasonable answer: He tries to use his round-the-world swimming to help people have a stronger connection to water.
Will he achieve his mission? He isn’t sure, but he’s willing to swim trying.
A born globe-swimmer
Moseley’s profile on Openwaterpedia says his notable swims to date include a 24.6 miler across Lake Pontchartrain in his home state of Louisiana; a 24 miler in Puerto Rico, from Culebra (Tamarindo Beach) to Fajardo; a 24.5 miler across the Caribbean; and a north-to-south 12.8 miler across the Sea of Galilee, which is actually not a sea but the lowest-elevation freshwater lake on Earth, in Israel, he pointed out.
But what he really loves is swimming rivers, like the Green, in Utah, from Mineral Bottom to the confluence of the Colorado (40 miles) in 2021; the Colorado, from Potash Point to the confluence with the Green (47 miles) in 2015; and from the Moab boat ramp to Potash Point (17 miles) on June 18.
His favorite rivers are ones nobody is known to have intentionally swum, like the Green, which starts way up north in Wyoming’s Wind River Range, rolls through Wyoming and Utah, and joins the Colorado hundreds of miles later in Canyonlands National Park.
Matt Moseley swimming the Green River from the Moab boat ramp to Potash Point through Canyonlands National Park. Moseley swims to bring attention to rivers and other bodies of water around the world. (Video courtesy of Tomas DeFrancia)Moseley’s friend Craig Childs, who has written about the Canyonlands region and its early peoples, thinks not even the Ancestral Puebloans, who reportedly left petroglyphs near Ashley Creek, one of the Green’s tributaries, would have considered swimming it for long distances. “It would have been difficult to get back,” Moseley said.
Even Moseley shudders a little when he thinks of swimming against the current rather than with it, but on almost all of his swims he’s trying to raise awareness for the plight of the world’s rivers through the advocacy group American Rivers, which has a goal of protecting 1 million miles of free flowing rivers by 2030 and removing 30,000 outdated dams by 2050, its website says.
Moseley’s river swimming obsession started in the last century, when his wife gifted him a canoe and a guided trip down the Colorado River to go with it. He brought his swim cap and goggles for his first river swim “in an open-water way,” he said.
“And it just felt so amazing and so transcendent that I really fell in love with it. There were no coach or lane lines. There was no clock. It was just free and easy.”
We’re all wired for water
Wallace Nichols is a neuroscientist from California who coined the term “neuroconservation” to describe the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, nature, art, conservation and poetry with a focus on water-related activities. He did a study about how the brain reacts to water and found that people make better decisions, they’re calmer, they’re more rational and they’re more at peace with the world around them when exposed to it, Moseley said.
“It kind of explains why my wife loves taking baths, or why people like to go sit next to Boulder Creek,” he added. “After you’ve been there for a little while, you start to sort of leave the terrestrial world behind.”
That sensation is what has driven him to swim bodies of water all over the world and return to the Colorado River for his most recent stretch through Canyonlands, which took 4 hours and 30 minutes and required him to wake up “pretty early” to maximize the morning shade, because “it was like 103 degrees,” he said.
Those temps aren’t so hard for him to deal with because he’s in the water, but they are for his support team surrounding him on boats and in kayaks. And their comfort and protection are paramount, he said. “They’re paddling hard to try to keep up with me. They can’t stop and take a pee on the beach. I mean they have to really be working.”
His top-drawer supporters aren’t necessarily his best friends, because you need “certain kinds of people that are committed to getting you” through your swim.
“One guy, Mark Williams, is a retired F-16 fighter pilot” and Buddhist contemplative Naropa University graduate, “so he knows how to stay in formation and not complain,” Moseley said The two met on a political campaign years ago where Williams was a foreign affairs advisor. He now runs VUMind and is a much sought-after mental conditioning and meditation consultant, Moseley has written. He and Wright began working together in the summer of 2012.
Wright is “really good at very loud whistling,” which he uses to get Moseley’s attention and keep him swimming in the right direction, Moseley said.
Moseley at the end of another successful river swim on June 18, 2025. (Photo courtesy of Tomas DeFrancia)His team also helps him stay in the thalweg, which Moseley explains is “the river inside of the river with the fastest current. You don’t want to be off in the eddies where there are rocks and the sticks and stuff like that, because they can be kind of dangerous.” Don’t worry: He never swims through rapids.
One team member is in charge of blowing a whistle every 30 minutes to let Moseley know it’s “time to feed” on bites and nibbles that add up to 100 calories. His favorite midswim foods range from a few bites of scrambled eggs to burritos to chicken lettuce wraps “and those little Belvita cookies. I kind of like to mix it up a bit. I’m not a big fan of the synthetic foods like gels and stuff.”
What Moseley is a fan of is the deep connection swimming gives him to rivers.
“It’s a spiritual task for me. It’s like going to prayer or to church. It’s feeling the silkiness of the water against your skin and the taste of, you know, this was Rocky Mountain snowmelt just hours before,” he said. “Just to really feel that timelessness of this water cutting through the canyons and the juxtaposition of swimming a cold river through a scorching desert. You feel really alive. And I also have an overwhelming sense of gratitude.”
And it makes him feel like an ultra-fit athlete.
“I mean, I don’t exactly look like an Olympic swimmer. I’ve got a little cobbyness, a little insulation there for the water. But it’s the only time I ever feel, like, Phelpsian, like Michael Phelps is stretching through the canyons and the eagles are flying and the canyons are rising up.”
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