Green River — Lodore Canyon

About

Green River, Lodore Canyon — 1869 Powell, Echo Park. The Green rises in the Wind River Range of Wyoming and runs 730 miles through Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah before reaching its confluence with the Colorado River in Canyonlands National Park, draining 44,850 square miles along the way. Within that vast system, the Lodore reach is a discrete 44-mile run in Moffat County, Colorado, rated Class III, with an optimal flow window of 1,500 to 5,000 cubic feet per second. USGS gauge 09234500 records an average of 1,700 cfs and a historic low of 1,500; the recorded maximum discharge stands well above the average, which is why the season here is long rather than snowmelt-dependent.

Powell supplied the names that still appear on the permits. During his 1869 expedition he named Lodore Canyon after "The Cataract of Lodore," the poem by the English writer Robert Southey. He named Disaster Falls for the boat his party wrecked there. The full run splits cleanly into two sections: Gates of Lodore to Echo Park, 19 Class III miles containing Disaster Falls and Hell's Half Mile; and Echo Park to Split Mountain, a 25-mile Class III continuation through Whirlpool Canyon and Split Mountain Gorge.

The watershed's documented history reaches back before Powell. The Lodore country lay within the ancestral territory of the region's Indigenous peoples, who used the river corridor for travel, hunting, and gathering; the 1800s-era treaties, the 1830 Indian Removal Act, and the allotment era of the 1840s through 1890s established the cession framework that followed. Through the 1830s to the 1920s, the surrounding watershed was logged to feed a regional timber industry and the railroad expansion of the 1860s through 1910s, with sawmills and logging drives as the major operators. The exhaustion of old-growth stands by 1910, the start of state forestry conservation in 1915, and the establishment of state forests in the 1930s brought large-scale logging to an end.

Lodore's defining chapter is a conservation fight. The Bureau of Reclamation proposed Echo Park Dam — a 535-foot structure inside Dinosaur National Monument, advanced between 1929 and 1950 — that would have drowned the heart of the monument where the Green meets the Yampa. The 1950 defeat of that proposal, driven by the Sierra Club under David Brower, became a landmark of the American environmental movement, and the Echo Park section of the Green was designated part of Dinosaur National Monument that same year. In 1956, Congress chose to exclude Echo Park from the Colorado River Storage Project Act, halting the dam and leaving the canyon free-flowing. Later recognition followed the same current: a 1968 Wild and Scenic designation of 44 miles of the Green in the Labyrinth and Stillwater Canyons, and the 1970 Wild and Scenic Rivers Act designation of the Green within Dinosaur National Monument.

Today the river is a premier trout and smallmouth bass fishery, and the Green River Conservation effort of 2010 through 2024 has protected 90 percent of the watershed from development. Private boating is administered by the National Park Service through a single annual lottery covering both Lodore Canyon and the Yampa. Outfitters including Adrift Adventures and OARS run multi-day expeditions through the canyon.