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The River’s The Thread: Floating The Green Corridor In Utah’s Desolation Canyon

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The Green River in Desolation Canyon in Utah/BLM, Bob Wick

The Green River in Desolation Canyon in Utah/BLM, Bob Wick

Editor's note: When talk turns to expanding the National Park System, eyes scurry across the country, looking for candidates. One logical addition that would greatly expand the park system's wilderness settings would be to connect Dinosaur National Monument in Utah with Canyonlands National Park to the south via the Green River. Flowing roughly 200 miles in length between the two parks, the river runs through a mix of state, private, and federal lands. Below Desolation and Gray canyons, the Green meanders through Labyrinth and Stillwater canyons, and highly popular with canoeists and touring kayakers who enjoy the scenery, historical relics and Indian ruins. Fred Swanson has floated through Desolation Canyon, and his story showcases what this stretch of river would bring to the park system.

Late one evening last summer, about the time that bats take to the air, I was stretched out on a patch of warm sand next to the Green River in Utah’s Desolation Canyon, waiting for stars to appear. Next to me were a couple my age from Baltimore and their two young grandsons, part of a group enjoying a six-day float trip with a Utah adventure outfitter. As darkness fell, the glittering band of the Milky Way spread above us from cliff to cliff. This was one of the reasons we had come to this place, for the “star river,” as the ancient Chinese poets called it, is no longer visible from our homes in the city.

The others in our party were relaxing over by the rafts, including my wife, who was getting acquainted with an inner-city schoolteacher from Brooklyn (another place that lacks a night sky). Unfortunately, they missed the meteor that flashed across our field of vision, flaring brightly before breaking into colorful fragments. It was one of those bonding moments that made us feel lucky to be out here. Although we met as strangers, that was quickly fading as we compared our previous experiences under this Utah desert sky.

Like so many places along the Green and Colorado Rivers, this canyon acquired its name from John Wesley Powell, whose pioneering expeditions passed through in 1869 and 1871. Observing the stunted vegetation clinging to the cliffs, he wrote that “we are minded to call this the Canyon of Desolation.” But the 85-mile float trip through “Deso,” as modern-day river runners call it, is anything but bleak. Abundant vegetation lines the river along much of its length, including lovely stands of Fremont cottonwood and boxelder. These offer shady campsites to boaters, but more important, they create habitat for an amazing variety of birds and other creatures. Each morning while the guides prepared breakfast, I joined the two boys on a search for animal tracks in the sand, trying to connect the myriad prints we saw with their owners. Nighttime must have been busy with creatures scurrying, crawling, hopping, and slithering all around our tents.

The "river of stars" above the Green River/BLM, Bob Wick

The "river of stars" above the Green River/BLM, Bob Wick

The standard trip down Desolation Canyon also takes in the topographically more subdued Gray Canyon, ending at Swasey Rapid above the town of Green River, Utah. Both canyons are carved into the lofty, heavily dissected Tavaputs Plateau, which in places makes Desolation deeper than the Grand Canyon.

Desolation Canyon lacks the airy, stairstepped magnificence of Arizona’s famous wonder, though, which may account for it never gaining national park status. This stretch of river, along with the plateau to the west, are part of the vast holdings of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management that comprise nearly 23 million acres in Utah alone and include some of its most beguiling desert landscapes.

“Deso” offers plenty of fine desert scenery along its length, but the picture tends to build gradually as you float along, never overwhelming you with grandeur as at, say, Bright Angel Point in the Grand Canyon. At each camp one gains a sense of intimacy with the life along this narrow riparian corridor. There were the paw prints of beaver in the mud by the river’s side, showing the mark of their broad tails where they waddled nocturnally up the sandy bank. There were the minnows that nibbled our feet while we stood in the river’s shallows, bringing giggles from us oldsters. We watched great blue herons glide from bank to bank, serene and prehistoric-looking, and one morning we came across a gaggle of turkey vultures warming themselves on a sandbar, content to watch us pass by.

My wife and I have floated other stretches of the Green in Utah, including the placid flows of Stillwater Canyon in Canyonlands National Park and the whitewater rapids of Whirlpool Canyon upstream in Dinosaur National Monument. Dinosaur also offers superb whitewater in Lodore Canyon, while far downstream in Canyonlands, expert rafters—certainly not us--take on the class five drops of Cataract Canyon. Because much of this river corridor is not accessible by road, it does not experience the crowding found in other parts of these national park system units.

The ultimate way to experience this river would be to tie together all of these sections in one float trip, as Powell and his men did. The river forms a single green thread connecting these disparate settings and jurisdictions, flowing almost entirely through public lands, from its headwaters in the northern Wind River Range of Wyoming to its confluence with the Colorado River deep in Canyonlands.

The river in much of Desolation Canyon forms the western boundary of the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation, which is closed to public use, limiting campers to the west bank. With use regulated by a BLM permit lottery, finding campsites is usually not a major issue, and at some of them one can visit prehistoric rock art sites, granaries, and other structures built by the Fremont people more than 700 years ago. This was tough country for even these resourceful desert dwellers, who tended summertime crops close by the river but typically maintained more permanent dwelling sites farther up in the side canyons, where they had better access to firewood and game animals.

Old homestead at Rock Creek Ranch/Fred Swanson

Old homestead at Rock Creek Ranch/Fred Swanson

Our group was exploring the mouth of one of these side canyons after dinner when we came across a lone bison, evidently separated from a herd that the Ute Indian Tribe reintroduced to the East Tavaputs Plateau in 1986. We gave it a wide berth, but its presence was a reminder of the connections between the river environment and the arid plateau lands surrounding it.

In 2019 much of the remaining roadless land on the West Tavaputs Plateau was designated wilderness through the John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act. Along with establishing the Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness farther downstream on the west bank of the Green, the act ensures that oil and gas development and motor vehicle use will not encroach on these sections of river, as they do farther upstream in the Uintah Basin.

The Dingell bill (named for one of Congress’s most prominent conservationists, who died last year) also designated 14 miles of the Green River in lower Gray Canyon as a wild river, and a 49-mile stretch in Labyrinth Canyon as a scenic river. This not only prevents a dam from being built on this reach of the river, as was proposed in the 1940s by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, but also protects against inappropriate development along a quarter-mile wide river corridor.

The Utah portion of the Dingell bill only addressed lands in Emery County, leaving the rest of the Green River (including its reaches within Dinosaur and Canyonlands) for future consideration in Congress. While this bipartisan legislation was a huge step forward for protecting public lands in Utah, its limitation to a single county illustrates the need for a more comprehensive approach to addressing land-use issues in this section of the Colorado Plateau Province.

The question surfaces repeatedly when energy development encroaches on protected landscapes, as it has across much of the Tavaputs Plateau. In January 2020, following objections from environmental groups, the BLM pulled a proposed oil and gas lease sale from a striking promontory called Horse Bench, which overlooks the Green River below the usual put-in at Sand Wash. The lease sale is undergoing further analysis, but expect it to resurface at some point. While it’s unlikely that drill rigs would be visible from the river, the cumulative effect of such development could take a toll on air quality, night-sky visibility, and the outstanding archaeological remains in Nine Mile Canyon, a tributary to the Green, where hundreds of trips by heavy trucks would reverberate between the canyon walls.

The push to develop energy resources could also include a proposed 3,000-megawatt nuclear power plant near the town of Green River, Utah, which would draw 70 cubic feet of water per second from the river for use in cooling towers. The drawdown would amount to a tiny fraction of the river’s average flow, but some biologists are concerned that during low flows, it could dry up as much as half of the backwater shallows that form important spawning habitat for endangered fish such as the bonytail chub.

With two major upstream dams regulating its flow, the Green is no longer a pristine river environment. Releases from Flaming Gorge Dam are calibrated to reduce impacts on endangered fish, but a recent agreement between the State of Utah and the Bureau of Reclamation, designed in part to supply water to the fast-growing St. George area via a proposed pipeline from Lake Powell, could alter this. The environmental group Living Rivers, among others, says the agreement fails to consider impending shortages in the river’s flow from drought and other factors (“Groups File Lawsuit,” National Parks Traveler, March 24, 2019).

Floating through Desolation Canyon/Fred Swanson

Floating through Desolation Canyon/Fred Swanson

The rivers which flow through Utah’s national park lands—the Green, Colorado, San Juan, Virgin, Escalante, and Dirty Devil—form complex ecosystems all along their lengths. The bighorn sheep that clamber down cliffs in Canyonlands for a drink at the Colorado River are depending on water from snowpacks far upstream. When dust blows from degraded rangelands in the Plateau Province, it falls on mountains in Colorado and accelerates spring runoff. Proposals to tap headwater streams in the Rockies will have effects hundreds of miles downstream.

The National Park Service has long recognized that what goes on outside the borders of national parks and monuments can critically affect these reservations, and this is certainly true where a river such as the Green connects two such units. The great rivers of the West have long been considered part of an elaborate plumbing system designed to supply our farms and cities, but the time has come to also view them as critical green corridors needed for lives other than our own.

Drifting quietly around the Green’s sweeping bends in Desolation Canyon, we witnessed this interplay between flowing water and the canyon environment. Just as the river brought my wife and I into new friendships with other adventurers, it connects all life up and down its length. From Dinosaur to Canyonlands, this free-flowing river affords innumerable creatures a home, a migration route, and a haven from many of our more disruptive activities. And it brought our small group into a brief communion with life as it has long existed.

After four decades of floating the Green River, I’m still absorbing its energy. Whether the river courses through a national park or through other public lands, it carries the same water and has the same profound influence on the land around it. Similar stories can be read in every wild river, whose lessons are freely available to all who care to wade in its waters.

Frederick Swanson’s book Wonders of Sand and Stone: A History of Utah’s National Parks and Monuments will be issued in June by the University of Utah Press. His website is www.fredswansonbooks.com.

Further river reading from the Traveler's archives;

Star-Struck Along The Colorado River In Canyonlands National Park

Exploring Canyonlands The River Way

A New, Free Audio Book Of The Exploration Of The Colorado River And Its Canyons From LibriVox

Essential Paddling Guide: Rivers, Rapids, & Reptiles Deep In Canyonlands National Park

Dinosaur National Monument: More Than You Can Imagine

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Comments

Captures it .  Have done 120 miles in fall when water low. In Canoes we fought winds , pleasant evenings on warm sand , Tamirisk controlled most of shorelines. Indian artifacts , wildlife , fireside memories without atificial light blocking out the heavens.  Deep sleep & fresh mornings . Lifetime peacefullness I carry from this excursion.


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