Green River

About

Powell's 1869 Expedition; Green River Fossils, 50 myo. The Green rises far to the north, flowing 730 miles from Wyoming through Utah before joining the Colorado River in Canyonlands National Park, established September 12, 1964. Along the way it passes through country older than reckoning: the Green River Formation, an Eocene layer roughly 50 million years old, has produced some of the most complete and abundant fossils ever found, including the famous Green River fish fossils—Knightia, Diplomystus, and Mioplosus—preserved in stone.

Long before Powell, the Green flowed through the ancestral territory of the Ute, the Southern Paiute, the Northwestern Shoshone, the Goshute, and the Navajo across central and southern Utah. The river was a primary travel corridor, a fishing ground, and a gathering place. The Ute Indian Tribe, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, the Northwestern Band of Shoshone Nation, and other nations maintain cultural connections and treaty-protected rights along its course. The 1861–1863 Treaty of Fort Bridger, the 1873 Ute Treaty, and the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act formed part of the framework that shaped this land.

The river was logged modestly from the 1860s through the 1920s—far less than the lower-elevation Utah valleys, which were largely treeless—to support the 1870–1910 high-elevation hardwood, pine, and aspen industry, the 1869–1883 Transcontinental Railroad and Utah mining-timber trade, and the silver and copper operations at Park City, Bingham Canyon, and Tintic. County sawmills and mine-timber and railroad-tie industries were the major operators until the old-growth stands were exhausted around 1910. The 1915 start of state forestry conservation and the 1930s creation of the Uinta, Wasatch, Manti-La Sal, and Fishlake National Forests ended large-scale logging.

Measurement of the river came with the 1890s–1910s USGS Utah Survey, led by geologist G.K. Gilbert and others, followed by the establishment of Green gauging stations in the early twentieth century and the Utah Department of Natural Resources streamflow surveys of the 1920s–1940s. Later assessments under the Clean Water Act, from 1972 onward, addressed more than a century of mining, agricultural, and industrial impacts, work that continues today through the Utah DEQ's Total Maximum Daily Load program.

The conservation impulse runs deep here. In 1972, a proposal was submitted to the Department of the Interior that the stretch from Ouray to Green River, Utah, be set aside as the Green River Wilderness National Monument. That impulse endures in how the river is managed today: the section of Labyrinth Canyon running from Swasey's Rapid south to the Emery/Wayne county line falls under the stewardship of the Bureau of Land Management. Since 2010, the Utah DEQ, in partnership with the Green Watershed Partnership and the Ute Indian Tribe, has worked on streambank stabilization and native fish restocking—especially for the endangered Colorado pikeminnow, humpback chub, razorback sucker, and bonytail, all four of the Colorado River 'big-river' fish protected under the 1994 Recovery Implementation Program. Powell's wild corridor remains intact for the paddlers who still read the meanders of Labyrinth by the same folded walls that first gave the canyon its name.