Green River — Flaming Gorge

About

Green River, WY — Rendezvous Site of 1824. Long before trappers or engineers, the Green River corridor through Flaming Gorge was shared territory of the Eastern Shoshone and Ute peoples. Archaeological sites throughout Red Canyon document thousands of years of habitation along the river, a depth of human presence that predates every later chapter of its story.

The modern history begins in 1824. That year, mountain men gathered at the site of present-day Daniel, Wyoming, for the first of the great fur-trade rendezvous — annual meetings where trappers and traders exchanged pelts for supplies before scattering back into the high country. The rendezvous became a 30-year tradition, held annually from 1825 to 1840, and it fixed the Green River at the center of the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade. The river also lends its name to the Green River Formation, the world's largest oil-shale deposit.

In May 1869, John Wesley Powell launched his historic expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers from Green River, Wyoming. It was Powell who named Flaming Gorge, for the brilliant red quartzite walls that seemed to burn in the afternoon sun. His survey put names to a landscape that mapmakers had left largely blank.

The watershed's economy turned to timber through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the 1830s through the 1920s, local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations worked the forests, supplying the regional timber industry and the railroad expansion of the 1860s through 1910s. The era closed as the old-growth stands were exhausted around 1910, state forestry conservation began in 1915, and state forests were established in the 1930s.

The river's greatest transformation came in 1962, when completion of Flaming Gorge Dam — set in Red Canyon, deep in Daggett County, Utah — turned the Green below it into a world-class cold-water fishery. The dam's roughly 40°F releases created ideal trout habitat where warm desert water once flowed. The reservoir it created reaches upstream for miles, its slack water extending to within a short distance of Green River City, Wyoming, where the canyon country gives way to open basin.

Today the Flaming Gorge stretch reads as three distinct sections. The seven miles from the dam to Little Hole run Class I–II and stand as premier fly-fishing water. Below that, the nine miles from Little Hole to Indian Crossing pick up to Class II–III through the whitewater of Red Canyon. The final 24 miles, from Indian Crossing to Clay Basin, settle back to Class I–II for a remote desert float. All of it lies within the Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area and Ashley National Forest. Outfitters including Flaming Gorge Resort and Old Moe Guide Service run float trips and fly-fishing trips on the tailwater below the dam, keeping both of the river's legacies — the trade route and the trout fishery — in working use.