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On a cool, damp morning in May, attorneys in suits and shiny dress shoes, and Boulder County residents in rain jackets and hiking boots streamed into a federal courtroom in downtown Denver.
Once everyone was seated, Senior Federal District Judge Christine Arguello convened the hearing. To her right was an elderly, rumpled dam engineer and a tall public interest lawyer from Washington, D.C. The duo represented a small, fiery nonprofit— Save The Colorado — which halted, at least temporarily, one of the largest dam projects in Colorado history, the Gross Reservoir Dam expansion.
On her left were more than a dozen attorneys and representatives of the dam’s owner, Denver Water, as well as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Department of Justice, arguing about whether the construction stop should continue.
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SUBSCRIBEIf it looked as if the balance of power was out of whack, it was. But despite the disparity in head count and legal muscle, and the judge’s decision to let the dam-building continue, Save The Colorado and its cofounder, Gary Wockner, had won a breathtaking, if short-lived victory.
The dramatic call to halt construction of a $531 million dam in the southwestern foothills of Boulder County, was a move Wockner had been seeking for more than 20 years.
He was already on a roll. In March, he scored another major win, obtaining a $100 million settlement from Northern Water that will help restore the Cache la Poudre River and the wildlife and plants that rely on its flows.
The two successful cases against Colorado’s largest water providers left heads spinning across the state, and will, experts say, have a profound impact on future water projects.
Here’s why: The Northern Water settlement is one of the largest environmental deals in Colorado, and came after two decades of water studies, legal challenges and a different, unsuccessful court case.
The Denver Water case, though Gross Dam construction will continue, means the agency may have to wait to fill the reservoir until after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers re-analyzes how much water is needed. Denver Water plans to appeal this portion of the lawsuit, but if Save The Colorado prevails, it could mean less water will come out of the Fraser River, a key tributary to the Upper Colorado River in Grand County.
“It absolutely will change how water is developed,” said Brad Wind, general manager of Northern Water.
Wind spent hours in private talks with Wockner to secure the settlement that will allow Northern to proceed with the Northern Integrated Supply Project, a massive, $2 billion reservoir and pipeline project, known as NISP, that will divert water from the Poudre to 15 cities and water districts serving about 500,000 people.
Wind said a reckoning is coming in how projects by utilities like his are designed and planned. Northern Water provides water to more than 1 million people and 1.6 million irrigated acres in eight northern Colorado counties.
“As folks envision a project, it will behoove them to think beyond the traditional water supply metric … delivering or storing … and to think more broadly about environmental and recreational components,” he said.
Gary Wockner looks out over a portion of the Poudre River that winds through Fort Collins. (Kira Vos, Special to the Colorado Sun)Who is this guy?
Wockner is a controversial figure in Colorado’s water arena, where disagreements rarely break out into open conflict.
But Wockner is all about open conflict. He doesn’t hesitate to go after fellow environmental activists whom he believes aren’t doing enough to combat the giant water institutions that control much of Colorado’s water.
“I have absolutely burnt bridges and caused relationships to be severed with some environmental organizations and the water utilities,” he said. “Our goal is never to make anyone happy, whether it is an environmental group, or a farmer, or a utility. Our goal is always to protect the river.”
The landmark wins this year, Wockner said, are simply the culmination of 20 years of tracking federal permitting processes, commenting on them, sounding alarms to the media, and issuing endless legal challenges.
“These are tiny, micro-organizations,” he said, referring to the nonprofits he helped create. “I tell people all the time, it’s not the size of the organization in the fight. It’s the size of the fight in the organization. We achieved success because we never stopped fighting.”
The 64-year-old wildlife ecologist and research scientist says old-style 1970s activists and anarchists such as Edward Abbey, and his books, “The Monkey Wrench Gang” and “Desert Solitaire,” were key to shaping his thinking as a young student at the University of Colorado.
Wockner, a mountain biker who drives a muddy, black Toyota truck, worked for years as a research scientist at Colorado State University, but in 2004 he and his fellow CSU research scientist, Mark Easter, founded Save The Poudre, precisely to stop the Northern Integrated Supply Project. Wockner later formed Save The Colorado and more recently, Save The World’s Rivers.
On the nonprofits’ websites are headshots of a young Wockner holding a sign that reads “Thank you my dear, I don’t want a dam.”
Another classic shot shows naked activists standing in a river, their backs to the camera, holding lettered sign boards that spell out “Save The Poudre,” “Save The Colorado” and “Save Our Rivers.”
A family walks across the Graham Family pedestrain bridge in Fort Collins. (Kira Vos, Special to the Colorado Sun)Always working with nickels and dimes, Wockner built small nonprofits with boards that included heavy hitters, such as world-renowned Colorado nature photographer John Fielder. Early on there was corporate support from New Belgium Brewing, Patagonia and Clif Bar.
He also tapped the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law and its Environmental Law Clinic, where students helped file endless briefs and pleadings for free.
Daniel Beard, former chief administrative officer of the U.S. House of Representatives and former commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, has been on Save The Colorado’s board since 2018. He met Wockner on the banks of the Colorado River during a rafting trip that came as Beard was writing the book, “Deadbeat Dams: Why We Should Abolish the Bureau of Reclamation and Tear Down Glen Canyon Dam.”
Wockner differs from the stereotypical image of 1970s eco-fighters, Beard said.
Those environmentalists “were seen as idiots,” Beard said. “They were running around doing any harebrained idea that they could think of. But this is not what Gary is doing. It’s a lot more sophisticated than that.”
Denver Water’s Gross Reservoir Expansion Project and Northern Water’s NISP have been in planning and permitting for more than 20 years.
Beard said Wockner’s successes this year are due to a steely tenacity, a methodical approach to the law, and a willingness to fight, year, after year, after year.
“Yes he has rough edges,” Beard said. “But he is effective.”
(Kira Vos, Special to the Colorado Sun)Our goal is never to make anyone happy, whether it is an environmental group, or a farmer, or a utility. Our goal is always to protect the river.
— Gary Wockner
Alan Salazar, general manager of Denver Water, says Wockner’s wins now are noteworthy, but that Wockner represents a small slice of the environmental community, not the behemoths, such as the Nature Conservancy or Trout Unlimited.
“Gary is on the fringe and he has a more radical view of what ought to happen. Sometimes he is taken seriously and sometimes he isn’t,” Salazar said. “I do believe he has benefited from the perception that he is speaking on behalf of a broad environmental coalition. … I don’t think that is necessarily accurate. He represents the fringe of the environmental community.”
But that doesn’t diminish the scale of his 2025 victories. Mark Squillace, a professor at the University of Colorado’s School of Law and environmental lawyer, said Wockner succeeds because he understands the complicated federal laws — the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act which dictate how water projects are designed and built.
In the Gross Dam case, Squillace said, Save The Colorado prevailed through several legal ups and downs until last fall, when Judge Arguello agreed with its position: That the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had erred in 2017 when it issued the final permit, violating NEPA and the Clean Water Act. The permit allowed Denver Water to raise the dam and nearly triple the capacity of the reservoir.
“There is no doubt it was a huge victory,” Squillace said, noting that he consults with Wockner’s coalition periodically.
In all, Wockner said, he and his groups have filed nine lawsuits in Colorado. They are continuing to fight the Thornton Pipeline. It is designed to deliver water from the Upper Colorado and Poudre rivers and other sources down to the fast-growing Front Range city. He will also continue to challenge Fort Collins’ plan to store more Poudre water in an expanded Halligan Reservoir about 25 miles northwest of town.
He also led the charge to introduce “Rights of Nature” rules at the local level, convincing a handful of city councils, including in Ridgway and Nederland, to mandate essentially that streams be given the same rights in court as human owners of water rights.
That push hasn’t always gone smoothly. Nederland, for instance, initially voted to support the move, but overturned the classification for Boulder Creek after Wockner filed a lawsuit challenging the town’s plans to build a reservoir.
Leo Pierson, 9, left, and Maya Pierson, 2, play in the Poudre River in Fort Collins. (Kira Vos, Special to the Colorado Sun)
People show up for the Poudre
Despite his work on other rivers, it is the Cache La Poudre where he got his start and learned the finer points of organizing and winning public support.
“It was easy back then,” he said. “Say the word and 1,000 people would show up, all to save the Poudre.”
On a recent walk along that river in Fort Collins, where groups have come together to restore the river and create a water park, Wockner says in the 25 years since he has been defending Colorado’s waterways, things have changed, in a good way.
“Our relationships with our rivers are different now,” he said, with the public increasingly seeking to embrace their local streams and use them to enhance their parks and towns.
Though some work has already been done on the Poudre, the $100 million NISP settlement will provide a wave of cash that will allow more water to stay in the river, something it desperately needs to keep cool and healthy as it flows east to the confluence with the South Platte River near Greeley.
“I am very happy that we ended up in this situation on the Poudre because, most importantly, this has been a long, bitter war, not just for us and NISP but for the community at large,” Wockner said.
He said he had been considering retiring, but has decided not to and will focus instead on ongoing legal battles in Colorado as well as a new campaign that challenges the notion that hydropower is a “green” electricity source despite its emissions of greenhouse gases.
And where necessary, he will back away from work that requires a different approach than his. He will not, for instance, be on the community work group that will decide how the NISP settlement money will be spent. “It’s just not my skill set,” he says.
Few question his ability as a pugnacious, environmental bad boy over the past two decades, but he said it hasn’t always been easy.
“This work is hard and it can drag you down. I mean, I don’t get invited to speak at meetings — ever — but I don’t mind.
“I feel lucky to be doing it.”
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