This 10-minute short film is both a tribute to the Yampa River in northwest Colorado and an inspiring story of conservation and the fight to protect our wild rivers.
Filmed by Logan Bockrath during the 2024 Yampa River Awareness Project river trip, A Guide to Fighting for Wild Rivers illustrates how OARS, American Rivers and Friends of the Yampa have worked together for more than a decade to build a coalition of support for the last free-flowing river in the Colorado River Basin. Every spring, the organizations invite key decision-makers, stakeholders, and activists on a mulit-day Yampa River rafting trip, offering them a chance to experience firsthand what could be lost if the river is threatened by a major dam, diversion, or dewatering project. For participants, it’s often a transformative journey that fosters deep, personal connections to the river, inspiring long-term advocacy efforts.
“The reality is that the Yampa River in the Colorado River system needs people to care beyond this basin, and OARS and American Rivers help us expand that network,” says Lindsey Marlow, Executive Director of Friends of the Yampa.
“We grow our network in support of wild rivers, healthy rivers, then their networks grow,” explains Matt Rice, American Rivers’ Southwest Region Director. “That’s how you build a movement for river conservation.”
The conservation model highlighted in the film takes a lead from early river crusaders David Brower, Bus Hatch, and Martin Litton, whose advocacy efforts in the 1950s and 60s helped achieve several major conservation wins for western rivers, galvanized by people’s love of a place. It’s a blueprint that the organizations believe can be applied to other wild rivers and public lands that deserve long-term protections.
“If there is ever a threat to the Yampa, there’s an army of folks who are connected to it through these YRAP trips—people that love it, that know it, that have gotten the silt under their fingernails—and they’ll fight for it,” said Mike Feibig, American Rivers’ Southwest River Protection Program Director. “They’ll protect this place.”
Quite simply, A Guide to Fighting for Wild Rivers is a testament to how rivers are protected by love.