Best of the Southwest – Canyonlands – Day 1 & 2 – Salt Lake City to Flaming Gorge

After a two year absence, I was happily returning to the American Southwest for fifteen days of deep exploration. I worked on the Kaibab National Forest near the North Rim of the Grand Canyon for fifteen years, between 1978-1992, and the redrocks still run through my veins like blood.

The weather forecast was unsettled for our first day up in southern Wyoming and northeast Utah, and then a big, fat high pressure system was going to bring hot and sunny weather for the next few weeks. Yes, I said weeks, and I was itching to revisit some of my favorite haunts.

But this would be a working vacation. I had just completed the draft of my next guide book, “The Best of the Southwest – Canyonlands”, a 7-14 day tour of some of the finest canyonlands on the Colorado Plateau, beginning out of the hub city of Salt Lake City, and my mission was to ground-truth the recommendations in my draft edition.

My old Annapolis buddy Jimmy Martin would be accompanying me as scribe and photographer and we would essentially be following the directions in the book to see if they made sense and were accurate. Over the course of two incredible weeks we made many corrections to the draft and found a slew of new attractions to add to the mix. It’s going to be helluva guide book and it should be available for sale on Amazon by this winter or early spring of 2018.

For the next few weeks I will be sharing my impressions of this wonderful journey. Some of it will be in sync with the book – go here, do this or that, eat at this restaurant, stay there, hike this trail – but for the most part it will be like any of my travel blogs: a glimpse into what makes a certain place and its people tick.

We landed in Salt Lake City around five in the afternoon, loaded up our blue Subaru Forester rental car from Thrifty, and were heading east on I-80 toward Wyoming by six. We had 175 miles to cover and about two hours of daylight. The speed limit was 80 mph and as we headed through the parched canyons leading out of Mormon Command Central I felt like a man finally set free.

Evanston, Wyoming

Southern Wyoming is oil and gas country, endless expanses of rolling brown hills pin cushioned by mining equipment large and small. There were no towns, trees, or water. The sky was skud cloud grey. The word bleak comes to mind. But at least it was warm. The last time I had cruised this same route was May of 2010, and it was snowing.

The first town we came to was Evanston, Wyoming. You can tell a lot about a place by the billboards that welcome and direct the weary traveler to the area’s best services. There were the usual advertisements for local hotels and restaurants, but the largest of these roadside signs were for sex shops, like Romantix, and 2 for 1 FIREWORKS!!! I felt like I was back in the South. Apparently the people of Evanston like to blow up shit and jerk off a lot. They also were infected with Powerball Fever – the jackpot had reached the obscene amount of $700 million – and I’m guessing the townspeople were itching to use their winnings to get the hell out of Evanston.

We had not planned on stopping in Evanston, but when we saw the Walmart, we immediately took Exit #5 and decided to pay the town a little visit. We needed to buy lawn chairs, a few cases of bottled water, and a sturdy cooler for a reasonable price. And we also needed to get our liquor before heading south into Utah where the beer is capped at 3.2% and you can only buy booze in State Liquor Stores which are few and far between and limited to daytime hours.

As we were exiting the Walmart parking lot after buying our supplies we spotted a big sign throbbing with red neon letters on a barn-like building: Discount Liquor. Yeah boy howdy! It turned out they had great prices and a huge selection of real beer, wine, and liquor. We bought rum, scotch and beer.

Green River, Wyoming

We were now locked and loaded for the rest of the trip and it had taken less than an hour to accomplish our mission in god-give-me-strength Evanston. We hopped back onto the interstate and sped off toward our destination: the Oak Tree Inn in Green River, Wyoming. It was eight o’clock, the sun was setting, and we still had 85 miles to go.

Green River restaurants closed at nine, but the Oak Tree Inn sat right behind Penny’s Silver Diner, a 24/7 flash from the sixties with Chuck Berry, The Beach Boys, and the Soul Train hit parade playing on the sound system non-stop. We ambled over and sampled their surprisingly tasty burgers and fries before crashing for the night. It had been a long, but interesting, day.

DAY 2

My first impression of Green River was that it wasn’t very green. It looked dry as a bone and the stunted brown grass crinkled under foot. It was obviously a dangerous fire trap. The inhabitants were essentially one careless cigarette thrown out the window of a passing car away from being lit up. No one seemed to notice.

The next thing that hit me was that there were very few women walking or driving around town. It was mostly men – white men – large, hard working, chain-smoking drillers and miners in dirty coveralls and fluorescent yellow vests driving the standard white pickups of the Let’s Tear It Up Clan. Every motel was filled with their muddy white F-150’s.

Our first stop in Green River after a yummy breakfast at the diner was the Green River Visitor Center on the west end of town where there were many informative outside exhibits about mining, horsies, and the ecology of the Green River Basin. Inside, there were some very cool Western artifacts and natural history books and – always a big plus – clean bathrooms. Jimmy and I sat on a bench overlooking the stark, yet lovely, Green River and the recently restored Kildeer Wetlands.

If wild horses are your thing, then you might want to take a little side trip on the Pilot Butte Wild Horse Scenic Tour – 26 miles off I-80, starting in Green River and paralleling UT 191, to the north. We didn’t have time for such a lengthy detour, but it it might be fun for folks who had another day or so to spend in the area. I mean, how can you not like wild horses?

Green River is primarily known for one thing: the industrial mining of trona and potash. Green River is the “Trona Capital of the World”. You can even follow the Trona Trail to the various mine sites. The largest and purest deposits of trona in the world can be found around Green River. What’s trona, you ask? Trona is a sedimentary mineral, sodium sesquicarbonate, deposited by an ancient inland lake as it evaporated 55 million years ago. It is mined about 1,500 feet below the earth with huge 75 ton boring drills that resemble metallic dinosaurs and then processed into soda ash.

Trona is used to make almost everything in your home and to control pollution. Twelve foot thick beds are mined in underground cities with maintenance shops, bathrooms, lunchrooms, electricity, and streets. Soda Ash is the primary ingredient in soap, baking soda, toothpaste, glass, glue, paper, snacks, fire extinguishers, and cattle feed. Westvaco sunk the first trona mine in 1946, right after World War II. The Church and Dwight Company opened their first sodium bicarbonate processing plant in 1986 (Arm & Hammer). Eventually there were five trona mines and four soda ash processing plants around Green River. The locals call it the “Trona Patch”. So, if you have a box of baking soda in your fridge, you have a little piece of Wyoming.

To put the importance of mining in perspective, there are so many shift workers living in Green River that the City Council banned door-to-door salesman so that the night shift could sleep in peace.

Wyoming is world-renowned for it’s many well-preserved fossils that were deposited millions of years ago in what were once ancient sea beds. This part of America and most of the Canyonlands were transformed from oceans, to lakes, to rivers and swamps many times over. Every rock formation we passed during our two week trip had started as a sand dune or the bottom of some large body of water. Then they had been uplifted into their current position when the continental tectonic plates smashed into one another. Wind, water, and erosion have done the rest.

Knightia, a small herring, is Wyoming’s state fossil. Geologists have also found alligators, turtles, bats, plants, crayfish, beetles, dragonflies, fig leaves, and palm fronds within the sandstone formations of southern Wyoming. And the prehistoric swamps deposited the coal which is fossilized peat. Hence the name “fossil fuel”.

Early industries included the making of railroad ties and ice cut from the frozen river and placed in insulating sawdust for local use in summer.

Burnout, also known as ling, is an eel-like predatory fish not native to the Green River. Someone put the damn things in the Big Sandy Reservoir in the 1990s and now they are taking over. And just like with the snake head fish in the Chesapeake Bay where I live, the fishery is becoming quite popular with the local anglers.

Non-native species, like ling, or the New Zealand Mudsnail, flourish and drive out the natives because of the dams like the Fortenelle and Flaming Gorge which have created unnatural, warm water “tail water” systems that are slowly destroying the god-given river system like the vibrant Killdeer Wetlands that once thrived in the river’s meander bends.

The Sweetwater County Museum is housed in the old Post Office on Main Street across from the town’s most popular Mexican restaurant Mi Casita. This amazing museum is FREE! and was well worth the hour we spent perusing its contents before taking an amusing walk around town.

They also have an outstanding museum, gift shop, bookstore, and library where they still do FREE! genealogy research.

The museum had some thought-provoking exhibits about petrified forests and dinosaurs; prehistoric and Native American people; trappers (beaver and bison) like Jedediah Smith, Kit Carson, and Jim Bridger; explorers and pathfinders like John Fremont, geologic surveyor Dr. Ferdinand Hayden, and John Wesley Powell; pioneers and settlers heading west to Oregon; Mormons and gold seekers (many trails went through Sweetwater); the Pony Express and stagecoaches; railroads like the Union Pacific; commercial steamboat operations along the Green River like the behemoth Comet; cattle ranchers, farmers, homesteaders and crazy coal miners; the Chinese “Massacre” on September 2, 1885 and the burning of Green River’s Chinatown; the propensity of global cuisine due to miners coming from all over the globe; and the building of the Lincoln Highway from New York to California in 1913, following two-track wagon trails whose highest point is at 8,835 feet at Sherman Hill, between Cheyenne and Laramie, where there is a giant bust of Lincoln … The Human Migration.

Mile long “double tracked” trains were constantly cruising through the town. Green River is the main switching yard for the Union Pacific trains rumbling through that part of the country day and night. The buildings literally shake with each passing train. Like the smell of a pig farm, I suppose one gets used to the vibrations.

Green River is also home to one of only two remaining pedestrian bridges over railroad tracks in America. Railroad buffs come from all over the world to see it and snap their pictures of a bygone era.

On the far side of the bridge were stone steps leading down to the river and two blocks away was Expedition Island, located in a city park connected to a paved Greenbelt trail along the Green River, where the Powell expeditions departed in 1869 and 1871, to explore the unmapped Green and Colorado rivers. John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran, explorer, and founder of the USGS is one of my all time heroes.

The Historic Hotel Tomahawk on Main Street was undergoing a full restoration. And that shows the townsfolk have hope that their little town will sustain itself, and are even willing to invest in a brighter future. They are really doing their best. But it’s going to be a hard sell, if you ask me.

There were many rather sketchy motels along Main Street, mostly on the east end of town, but they were right next to the railroad tracks and I’m guessing it would be insanely loud and disturbing to stay there.

Down by the railroad tracks on West Railroad Avenue is where we found the town’s dive bars, along with Wyoming’s most unique building, The Brewery, an old German brewery, now a local bar, erected in 1900, with stone beer kegs and chalices crowning its roof like castle ramparts.

Green River has grown and gotten nicer since I was there many years ago. There’s public art scattered throughout the town and flower baskets hanging along Main Street. But it’s still the kind of place where you can stand in the middle of the incredibly wide and pretty much empty streets – other than the ore trucks barreling through town – and hold a conversation … or maybe even take a quick nap.

Flaming Gorge Dam, Utah

It’s about seventy miles from Green River Wyoming to Flaming Gorge, in Utah. Nine miles east of town we exited I-80 and headed south on UT 191. We would be traveling this historic north/south two-lane road for the next seven days, all the way to the Arizona border in Mexican Hat, Utah. (450 miles)

It was a little after noon and a menacing wall of dark, angry clouds were slowly drifting toward us from the south. The weather around Flaming Gorge always seems to suck.

You are allowed to camp anywhere you like for up to 14 days in any national forest or BLM land in America for free, unless it is clearly posted that you can’t. It is the same for all Bureau of Land Management Lands (BLM). And most of the lands we were passing through were managed by the BLM, so giddy-up go. It’s your land.

There were many dirt roads leading to primitive camping areas in the Pinyon-Juniper (P-J) high desert along UT 191 right after we turned off I-80 about six miles east of Green River. And farther down UT 191 there was the Fire Hole Campground.

There is a full service resort just before the Flaming Gorge Dam on the left called Dutch John Resort with gas, hotel, campground, sporting goods, general store, and a pretty good steakhouse. We had a most excellent lunch served by a friendly Ukrainian lady who spoke perfect English with a heavy Slavic accent. It’s a very small world indeed these days.

Jimmy and I stopped at an amazing overlook above the Flaming Gorge Reservoir and Dam and watched the ominous storm roll in, lightning bolts cutting the sky like light sabers. It was borderline biblical.

We decided to ride out the storm in the safety of the Flaming Gorge Visitor Center. From my previous visit I knew the facility had some really nice interpretive exhibits covering the history, wildlife, and cultural resources of this unique unnatural gem. We spent about an hour there, hiding from the rain. By two o’clock, the storm had passed and it was time to go back outside and play.

We briefly toyed with the idea of going for a half-day raft trip, or maybe even hiring a guide and go fishing on the Green River which is home to some of the best trout fishing in the U.S., but we decided to just go for a leisurely hike along the river instead.

Little Hole National Scenic Trail

This 8-mile long trail begins at the bottom of the 510-foot-tall Flaming Gorge Dam and runs along the north bank of the Green River. The trail is well-maintained and very easy to follow (once you find it). It’s out and back, so it was up to us how far we wanted to hike. If we walked down river for two miles, then it would end up being a four mile hike, and that’s exactly what we did. The trail is in a deep canyon with towering rock walls framing the river that is home to the local fishermen in their colorful dories and abundant assortment of wildlife, like soaring hawks and golden eagles. We saw several hawks hunting for their fresh trout dinner and they seemed to be doing better than the fishermen.

Getting to the right trailhead proved to be a bit tricky. We followed the River Access sign to the left just before the dam. You can’t park at the trailhead, so we drove past the first large parking area after a sharp right turn on the road down to the river and passed through the unattended entrance station.

Then we parked in the lot on the left by a trash can covered in stickers, as instructed by the friendly ladies at the Visitor Center, where there was a short, steep and rocky trail that led to the Little Hole National Scenic Trail along the Green River. Or, as we discovered on the way out, the easier way was to just walk down the road to the river.

By this point, the sky had turned blue and it was a glorious hot, sunny day. I knew the crystal clear Green River had just been released from the bottom of the tall dam and would be freezing cold, but I’m part manatee and felt compelled to do a little skinny dipping, just as a commercial river trip floated by in their bright yellow rafts.

As much as we would have liked to stay at Flaming Gorge, we had to push on; another storm was blowing in and it looked like it might be snowing atop the looming Ashley Mountains which we still had to drive over in order to drop into the dry and sunny canyons to the south.

We drove back across the top of the dam, waving goodbye to a large blue heron perched atop the railing of the concrete dam. We began our long climb out of the gorge on the twisting highway that would lead us up into the stormy mountains, stopping briefly to snap some photos at a space age Jetsons Bridge with “NO CLIFF DIVING ” signs posted on the edge of the canyon.

And sure enough, when we crested the summit of the Ashleys about thirty minutes later it was hailing to beat the band. The road was covered with slush and the scene was downright arctic. That was the last we would see of such wintry foolishness. From there on, we would be getting baked in the redrock oven.

On our first day in Canyon Country, we had gone through summer, fall and winter in the course of about twelve hours. It was a good lesson for the start of our 14-day road trip through the desert Southwest: ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN AT ANY TIME. And that’s just the way I like it.