North Platte River — Northgate Canyon

About

North Platte River, Wyoming Colorado Nebraska — 1841-1869 Oregon Trail, 1909 Pathfinder Dam, 1939 Seminoe, 1100-mi. The North Platte gathers itself along the Continental Divide, pulling from the Grizzly River and Little Grizzly River in Jackson County before turning north out of Colorado. Across the Wyoming line the river's character sharpens. Northgate Canyon opens above 8,000 feet and drops 470 feet over 18 miles, and that gradient does the work — the current tightens into Class III–IV rapids that boaters have long sought out. In Carbon County the river runs remote and free-flowing, one of Wyoming's defining stretches of unimpounded water, its rapids still tumbling much as they did before the dams.

Long before the boaters, the corridor through Carbon County was territory of the Northern Arapaho and Cheyenne peoples. The river served as a critical travel route between the Medicine Bow Mountains and the Great Plains, a natural highway threading the high country and the plains beyond. That role as a corridor would repeat itself for the emigrants who followed.

The river entered the written record with the surveyors. In 1842, John C. Fremont's second expedition followed the North Platte upstream through present-day Carbon County, documenting the canyon sections and the surrounding high desert landscape. Fremont's report, published in 1845, fixed the river's course on the map; the landscape he described would become a landmark for Oregon Trail emigrants. Between 1841 and 1869 the Oregon Trail followed the North Platte for hundreds of miles, carrying 400,000 settlers toward the Pacific Northwest along the water Fremont had charted.

The watershed also fed an industry. From the 1830s through the 1920s, the North Platte through Northgate Canyon was logged to supply the regional timber trade and the railroad expansion that reached across the century. Local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations were the major operators. The era wound down 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 modern chapter is one of engineering. The Pathfinder Dam, completed in 1909 some 47 miles southwest of Casper, was the first major dam on the North Platte and marked the beginning of a new era of storage and irrigation. A series of major dams followed across the twentieth century — Guernsey in 1927, Alcova in 1938, Seminoe in 1939, Kingsley in 1941, and Kortes in 1951 — reshaping much of the 1,100-mile river that rises in the Medicine Bow Mountains and flows north and then east through Wyoming and Nebraska. Yet Northgate Canyon stayed wild, and the North Platte today is a popular trout-fishing destination supporting the Casper, Scottsbluff, and North Platte economies.

That fishery earned formal recognition in 2015, when Wyoming Game & Fish designated the North Platte through Northgate Canyon a Blue-Ribbon Trout Stream in acknowledgment of its wild brown and rainbow trout populations. The designation triggered enhanced habitat protections and catch-and-release regulations. Above the canyon, the Saratoga-to-Pick Bridge reach runs 20 miles of Class I as a classic meadow trout stream; Pick Bridge to Northgate Canyon covers 25 remote miles of Class II–III; and below, the 25 miles from Northgate Canyon to Seminoe Reservoir make a desert canyon float. Guides such as Great Rocky Mountain Outfitters and Hack's Tackle & Outfitters run float trips through the country the river carves.