The River Knows Everything: Desolation Canyon and the Green

By James M Aton and Dan Miller

Desolation Canyon is one of the West's wild treasures. Visitors come to study, explore, run the river, and hike a canyon that is deeper at its deepest than the Grand Canyon, better preserved than most of the Colorado River system, and full of eye-catching geology-castellated ridges, dramatic walls, slickrock formations, and lovely beaches. Rafting the river, one may see wild horses, blue herons, bighorn sheep, and possibly a black bear. Signs of previous people include the newsworthy, well-preserved Fremont Indian ruins along Range Creek and rock art panels of Nine Mile Canyon, both Desolation Canyon tributaries. Historic Utes also pecked rock art, including images of graceful horses and lively locomotives, in the upper canyon. Remote and difficult to access, Desolation has a surprisingly lively history. Cattle and sheep herding, moonshine, prospecting, and hideaways brought a surprising number of settlers--ranchers, outlaws, and recluses--to the canyon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Release date: Apr 20, 2009
• ISBN: 9780874217360

Book preview

THE RIVER KNOWS EVERYTHING

DESOLATION CANYON AND THE GREEN

Green River and Desolation Canyon

THE RIVER KNOWS EVERYTHING

DESOLATION CANYON AND THE GREEN

James M. Aton

Photography by Dan Miller

Utah State University Press

Logan, Utah

Copyright © 2009 Utah State University Press

All rights reserved

Utah State University Press

Logan, Utah 84322-7800

www.usu.edu/usupress

A percentage of the author’s royalties from sales of this book will be donated to the Uintah-Ouray Ute Indian Tribe.

Manufactured in China

ISBN: 978-0-87421-652-3 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-0-87421-736-0 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Aton, James M., 1949

 The river knows everything : Desolation Canyon and the Green / by James M. Aton ; photography by

Dan Miller.

  p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-87421-652-3 (cloth) -- ISBN 978-0-87421-736-0 (e-book)

1.  Desolation Canyon (Utah)--History. 2.  Green River Valley (Wyo.-Utah)--History. 3.  Land set

tlement--Utah--Desolation Canyon--History. 4.  Land settlement--Utah--Green River Valley (Wyo.

Utah)--History. 5.  Desolation Canyon (Utah)--Biography. 6.  Oral history--Utah--Desolation Canyon.

7.  Natural history--Utah--Desolation Canyon. 8.  Natural history--Utah--Green River Valley (Wyo.

Utah) 9.  Desolation Canyon (Utah)--Pictorial works. 10.  Desolation Canyon (Utah)--Environmental

conditions. I. Miller, Dan, 1954- II. Title.

F832.D46A86 2009

979.2’5--dc22                                                 2008053869

To my mother, Roseanne Bauer Aton (1925–2003)

Das Zuhören hat mich der Fluss gelerht, von ihm wirst auch du es lernen. Er weiss alles, der Fluss, alles kann man von ihm lernen.

(It was the river that taught me how to listen; you too will learn how from the river. The river knows everything; one can learn everything from it.)

—Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha: An Indian Tale (1922)

Contents

INTRODUCTION

1 LIZARD-GNAWED DESERT: NATURAL HISTORY

Geology

Trees and Other Riparian Vegetation

Native Fish

Black Bears

2 WALLS OF ROCK ART: UNFOLDING THE NATIVE STORY

Clovis and Archaic

Fremont

Ute

3 EXPLORATION: FROM EXPLOITATION TO RECREATION

Fur Trapping

Surveying

Recreation and Profit

4 BUNCHGRASS AND WATER: SETTLEMENT, 1880 TO 1950

Outlaws and Ranchers

Utes, Ferrymen, and Moonshiners

Mining and Dams

5 GOVERNING A WILD RIVER: 1950 TO THE PRESENT

Agencies and Laws

Dams and Native Fish

Animals, Endangered and Protected

Wilderness

River Running, River Management, and Cultural Resources

EPILOGUE: THE SHAPE OF THE RIVER

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Illustration Sources

Index

The river corridor retains its wild and pristine qualities.

Often lined by two-hundred-year-old cottonwoods, beaches along the river invite boaters to camp and watch the river flow by.

Introduction

The overturned cauldron circumscribes the Tavaputs Plateau, a heart-shaped table

of wrinkled peaks cleaved by the sinuous river as a hot wire cuts through ice.

—Ellen Meloy, Raven’s Exile

Desolation Canyon defines what a wilderness river trip should be. It has it all: remoteness, rapids, steep walls, bears, Indian ruins, old-growth cottonwoods, and quiet.¹

In Desolation Canyon, the Green River cuts a 118-mile, serpentine swath through a larger geomorphic unit called the Tavaputs Plateau. The region’s massively crumpled topography of steep canyons and deep ravines has eroded out of hundreds of square miles of forested plateaus. At its nadir at Rock Creek, Desolation measures deeper than the Grand Canyon. Its gorgeous layered geology and sharp-lined, castellated ridges are unique in canyon-country geology. Desolation also features the largest debris fans in the Colorado River Basin—by a significant amount. These fans helped form part of the long, wide river bottoms that encouraged cattlemen to graze their stock there in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The area is remote and protected by daunting ramparts and thus supports an array of wildlife such as black bears, bighorn sheep, and elk.

Because the free-flowing Yampa River is a major contributor to the Green River in Desolation and Flaming Gorge Dam only half-controls its flows, its hydrologic regime is the least perturbed in the basin and probably the healthiest in the entire Colorado River system. As in the predam days, one year may bring rampaging floods, while during the next, the river will turn into a boulder-strewn trickle. Unlike the situation in the sediment-starved Grand Canyon below Glen Canyon Dam, Desolation’s wide beaches still get fed annually. Often lined at the high-water mark by seventy-feet-tall, four-feet-thick, two-hundred-year-old cottonwoods, these beaches invite boaters to camp and watch the river flow by. The ancient cottonwoods and their offspring that line the river, along with box elders, help define a green corridor in an otherwise-arid environment. The canyon’s willows and other native vegetation are holding their own against aliens like tamarisk.

Ute Chief Tavaputs, ca. 1871.

Desolation is hard to get to, so you feel as if you are far removed from everything civilized. And you are. The canyon sits in the least-inhabited section of Utah. It also has the fewest paved roads. But it has water—a major river and side streams—and in the arid West, water is a magnet, no matter how remote its location.

Because of the wilderness plateaus to the east and west of its north-to-south-running river, Desolation retains most of the wildlife indigenous to the area. Bighorn sheep, deer, bison, elk, and antelope move up and down its many side canyons. Native fish like the Colorado pikeminnow call the river home, while beavers make lodges out of willows along the banks and up side streams. Black bears roam the river in summer, searching for currants and elderberries to gorge on. They also sometimes ransack boaters’ camps, looking for easy food. Up until the 1920s or ’30s, grizzlies joined their black bear cousins in worrying people that they might become these animals’ next meal. Grizzlies have now been extirpated from the region, however, as have wolves. Theoretically land managers could reintroduce grizzlies and wolves as they have otters, moose, buffalo, and bighorn sheep, but the politics surrounding these large predators make their restoration unlikely.

As wild as Desolation is, shards of history and prehistory lie around every turn and up every side canyon. Thousands of Fremont petroglyphs, house sites, and granaries dot the walls of the canyon and its tributaries. Likewise, unique, stunning galleries of Ute Indian rock art add further interest to the walls and rocks, and Ute place names like Tavaputs and Tabyago abound in the region. Beautiful stone ranch houses and crumbling cabins nestle in various river bottoms, attesting to more than half a century of Euro-American sheep and cattle grazing in the area. And the cabins, cables, skiffs, trunks, and wall scratchings of moonshiners, ferrymen, gold miners, outlaws, and dam builders remind visitors of relatively recent attempts to live in this harsh place.

As if that were not enough to entice and charm a river traveler, there is Desolation’s quiet. Tour flights and helicopters are nowhere to be heard, unlike in the airportlike Grand Canyon. At side canyons like Chandler and Nine Mile, it is possible to drive bone-crunching roads to the river, but that rarely happens. The paths of most cross-country commercial flights skirt the region. With a mere six thousand boaters floating it each year, the canyon feels uncrowded. That sensation only intensifies when you hike side canyons away from the river. There you are always alone. Compared to most other large areas in Utah and the West, Desolation is, though fertile and lovely, desolate.

The cabins, cables, skiffs, trunks, and rock wall scratchings of moonshiners, ferrymen, gold miners, outlaws, and dam builders remind visitors of relatively recent attempts to live in this harsh place.

A persistent river legend claims that a biologist studying mosquitoes ranked the mozzies at Sand Wash in the top five places on the planet for insect density. Fletcher Dean adorns full mozzie regalia for the onslaught.

But with all that remoteness and wildness comes the harsh side of a desolate canyon area. The winds in Desolation are some of the fiercest and longest lasting of any river in the Colorado system. These gales can drive boaters off the river for more than a day, making it impossible to advance downstream. Then there are the canyon’s legendary mosquitoes. Desolation’s can be as dense as humidity along the Gulf Coast. In fact, a persistent river legend claims that a biologist studying mosquitoes ranked the Sand Wash put-in among the top five places on the planet for insect density. Although this is probably an exaggeration, old guides and river rangers swear it is true. When a hatch arrives, some people have even waded into the river to spend almost all their camp time rather than endure scores of mosquito bites.

Everywhere in the Intermountain West, weather can change quicker than a gambler’s luck, but somehow the shift feels most abrupt in Desolation. One May day you can be lathering sunscreen on your near-naked body in ninety-degree heat. That afternoon a snowstorm can find you digging for every piece of fleece and rain gear in your river bag.

While the canyon’s remoteness is part of its allure, a mishap makes you feel as if you are in the Australian outback. When a boater dislocates his hip at Rattlesnake Rapid, gets crushed to death by a falling rock slab at Flat Canyon, wakes to a bear pawing him at Fretwater Falls, or drowns at Steer Ridge Rapid, it is a long way to help.² At times like these, Desolation Canyon feels anything but picturesque and certainly more red in tooth and claw.

Desolation Canyon’s name—an explanation of it and the debate about its appropriateness—could occupy the better part of a chapter, but here are both the basic facts and some interpretations. What boaters call Desolation is actually two canyons: Desolation and Gray. John Wesley Powell named them both on his two trips through the region in 1869 and 1871. Desolation begins just south of Willow Creek about mile 118 in the Belknap Desolation River Guide.³ It ends, and Gray Canyon begins, below Three Fords Rapid at mile 36. Gray (originally called Coal then Lignite for the thin coal beds in the Mesa Verde Group laid down during the Cretaceous period) derives its name from the color of the sandstone that heads the canyon. Following common usage, this book usually refers to both canyons simply as Desolation. There are exceptions when there’s a point about geology or on other occasions that require a distinction.

John Wesley Powell, right, named the canyon in 1869.

Two factors explain why Powell named the first and longer canyon—more than eighty miles—Desolation. First, the expedition had just floated through the forested Lodore Canyon and over eighty miles of tranquil, flat water in the Uinta Basin. That basin’s banks are generally lined by cottonwoods, willows, grass, and other lush vegetation. The topography beyond is flat, blocking a view of the surrounding country. What you see from the river is a placid and relatively green landscape. But south of Willow Creek, when the river starts slicing into the north end of the Tavaputs Plateau, the hills that rise up are barren. To the Powell expedition, this must have been a jarring contrast to a tree-lined Lodore Canyon and a green Uinta Basin. Powell said that even the juniper trees in Desolation looked like ugly clumps, like war clubs beset with spines.⁴

In addition to the changing landscape, consider also that expedition members had just raided Pardon Dodds’s vegetable garden on the Big Island right below the mouth of the Duchesne River. The potato-top greens they cooked up contain the glycoalkaloid poison, solanine. Expedition members were vomiting and probably hallucinating when they encountered the barren hills of upper Desolation. No wonder they recoiled at the arid landscape.

Most later river travelers took time to comment on the accuracy of the name. For the next fifty years, they generally agreed with Powell’s denotation. When explorers like Buzz Holmstrom began to run the river for fun in 1937, however, perceptions began to change.

Although now most boaters see the romantic rather than the gothic aspects of the name, the term desolation nevertheless probably spooks some potential visitors. In fact, one river guide believes the names Desolation and Gray make the area sound both scary and dull. Keeps out the riffraff, he jokes. This makes for more of a wilderness experience for all who stroke their way down the canyon. In addition, fewer people mean less danger of the canyon being loved to death—the fate of many wilderness areas.

South of Willow Creek, the river starts slicing into the north end of the Tavaputs Plateau.

If Desolation has avoided becoming an overregulated, industrial boating experience like one encounters in the Grand Canyon and Dinosaur, dark clouds of human intrusion still hover near its edges. Like most public lands in the West with water, everyone wants a piece of Desolation. Boaters, hunters, and fishermen want to play there. Distant cities, especially Denver, covet the water of its main tributary, the Yampa.

Most alarmingly, oil companies are scrounging for the last untapped reserves in the Lower Forty-Eight, and Desolation’s Green River Formation is hydrocarbon rich. The push by the George W. Bush administration since 2001 to drill for oil and gas on public lands threatens many parts of the canyon, not to mention other areas of the West. In the early part of the twenty-first century, the upper section between Willow Creek and Sand Wash saw numerous pumps rammed into the ground. In February 2008, the Bill Barrett Corporation of Denver proposed sinking a number of wells in and around wilderness study areas along the west side of the river. If approved, wells will be pumping within a mile and a half of the river.⁵ Meanwhile, on the Ute side, the east bank, drilling has commenced some five to ten miles from the river. Only the Utes know how many wells will tap the oil and gas reservoirs. But we will all soon learn how those wells will affect the wilderness experience that Desolation is, not to mention its ecological health. For years Desolation’s remoteness made it a place of last resort. Because of oil and gas, that may change.

This book begins by telling how this geologic landscape formed and describing its natural features; it then spends the rest of its pages tracing the story of all the peoples who have come and gone in this area over thirteen millennia. In part it constitutes an environmental history, a narrative of the way humans have lived in, worked with, changed, and been changed, in turn, by that landscape. Thus, the riparian landscape of Desolation anchors this story. In addition to adopting the perspective of environmental history, this monograph also incorporates other subfields of history: social, cultural, recreational, institutional, and even economic.

Chapter one describes the landscape and points out some of its striking and unusual natural elements. Geology is obviously paramount to Desolation’s appeal. The geologic history is relatively simple, but certain features of that geologic story that have recently attracted Euro-Americans are emphasized: debris fans, copper, Gilsonite, oil shale, gas, and oil, for example. Another unique feature of Desolation’s environment is its native riparian vegetation of Fremont cottonwoods, box elders, coyote willows, and grasses like sand dropseed and western wheatgrass. Those natives have stood fairly successfully against alien invaders like tamarisk and cheatgrass. Yet the riparian system is dynamic and continues to evolve in response to climate change, dams, and the introduction of these nonnative species. Discussions of some charismatic and newsworthy mammals, like black bears, and native fish species, such as the endangered Colorado pikeminnow, are also included.

The push since 2001 to drill for oil and gas on public lands threatens many areas near the river and canyon.

The second chapter begins with the story of Native peoples living in the canyon/plateau system. Various Native American tribes have called Desolation and the surrounding Tavaputs Plateau home for thirteen millennia. Clovis, Archaic, and Ute Indians hunted and gathered, while the Tavaputs Fremont Indians mixed part-time farming into that lifeway. These horticulturalists reached a high point of population and occupation about AD 1000. No previous or subsequent period saw as many people trying to make a living in the canyon; thus, current archaeological research focuses on them.

The Ute occupation that followed—always seasonal—probably peaked in the late-nineteenth century. It coincided with these Shoshoneans being pushed out of their native lands all over Utah and western Colorado and shunted off to a reservation that included the Uinta Basin to the north, most of the river, and the East Tavaputs Plateau. Their use of and access to the river changed dramatically in the years after 1905 when Congress opened up the reservation to settlement. Euro-Americans basically stole Uintah Ute land because it contained something whites wanted—the hydrocarbon, Gilsonite.

The third chapter moves back eighty years prior to the 1905 reservation creation and chronicles the various Euro-American explorers—all male except for one French woman—who presaged and postdated that event. From fur trappers like William Ashley in 1825 to government surveyors like Powell in 1869 to filmmakers like the Kolb brothers in 1911, most sought to exploit the canyon in some way. Few of their enterprises yielded much profit. But they revealed the area to the nation at large. Their information helped inscribe Desolation and the Tavaputs onto the map of the United States and transformed it from terra incognita to discovered country. Their activities also led to and inspired the river’s current use: boating for fun and profit.

In the course of western history, settlers typically followed explorers. That was certainly the case with Desolation, too, although there was little communication between the two groups. Desolation was the place of last resort for the post–Civil War cattle and sheep boom. Chapter four details the various Anglo men and women who found their way down to the canyon between 1880 and 1950. It also tells of a few Utes who hung onto the old ways and places. In that period, unique in the history of Utah settlement, individual ranchers, moonshiners, miners, and ferrymen drifted into the area, seeking the last chance for free land.

Only three individuals, however, ever filed land claims along the river. Nonetheless, this was the period of second-highest population density after the Fremont fluorescence eight hundred years earlier. Ranching drove that period’s settlement, but it had all pretty much ended by World War II. The livestock market’s tentacles that had reached into Desolation were too thin and stretched to survive. Federal land laws, the lure of better pay in urban areas, the slide of the price of wool, and the reestablishment of Ute tribal hegemony on the east side of the river: all these factors led to abandonment, to the creation of a vacuum, filled by government agencies.

The last chapter narrates the rise of administrative control of this public land along the river corridor. Various tribal, state, and federal agencies, such as the Uintah-Ouray Ute Indian Tribe, Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, Bureau of Land Management, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, have limited jurisdiction over different sections and features of these public lands. Whether it relates to boating rules, oil-drilling permits, endangered-species research, cultural-resource protection, or water regulation, the story of Desolation in the past seventy years is one shaped by institutions and land laws, not individuals. Often, however, these agencies have conflicting missions, compounded by land laws that clash. For example, the 1973 Endangered Species Act often knocks against the older 1872 General Mining Act. Nevertheless, since the mid-twentieth century, land agencies have largely focused on restoration. That may well remain their theme for the rest of this century.

An epilogue speculates about the way some of those thorny public-land conflicts may play out in the next fifty to one hundred years—both worst- and best-case scenarios. A few predictions can be safely stated, but most cannot. Scores of factors could maintain the Desolation Canyon environment as it is or change it irrevocably. For example, if oil and gas drilling is stopped in its tracks, if Flaming Gorge Dam comes down (or at least comes close to its stated goal of mimicking nature), if endangered-species recovery brings back the threatened natives, if climate change slows or reverses course, if cultural-resource protection successfully educates the public to leave artifacts in place, Desolation may end up becoming a touchstone for resource protection.

On the other hand, if oil companies have their way, the canyon may become one long pumping field. And, if a growing Denver and an ever-thirsty Front Range succeed, the Yampa River may see a dam rise at Maybell, Colorado; this would irrevocably change the Yampa and Green ecosystems. And if global warming proceeds on its current course, water flows in the canyon will probably shrink drastically. How will fish, wildlife, and vegetation adapt to that? No one can predict, but the environmental consequences do not look very pretty from this perspective.

Queen Nefertiti towers over the river’s corridor.

All natural systems change. Desolation’s environment has been dynamic, even before Euro-Americans settled there. Climate and hydrologic fluctuations have figured into that change, as have factors such as the introduction of tamarisk. Native Americans managed the environment, altering it in small ways. Yet Desolation’s riparian environment today is more like it was at the beginning of the Holocene, ten thousand years ago, than are many other riverine areas. It is with the story of Desolation’s natural history—geology, flora, and fauna—that this narrative begins.

Desolation boasts steep, dramatic walls.

The formation E. O. Beaman of the Powell expedition called Sharp Mountain.

CHAPTER ONE Lizard-Gnawed Desert

NATURAL HISTORY

I sit inside a million acres of remote, lizard-gnawed Utah desert.

—Ellen Meloy, Raven’s Exile

The thing that most strikes you about almost any Colorado Plateau river is the rock-walled canyons. There is nothing else quite like them in the world. In that way—and in many others—Desolation does not disappoint. Geology surrounds you every foot of the way. Desolation boasts steep, dramatic walls. It also contains the largest debris fans and the widest river bottoms in the Colorado system, and it is deeper than parts of the Grand Canyon. Its side-canyon hiking may not hold the kind of jewels found in the Grand Canyon at places like Elves’ Chasm or Nautaloid Canyon, but Desolation’s drainages offer the most numerous and some of the longest and most varied hikes in the system. You could spend months following the trails of the Tavaputs Fremont Indians, climbing thousands of feet from river to rim. Along the way, you would discover thousands of their houses, rock art panels, and food-storage sites and encounter diverse biotic zones and microenvironments.

Desolation’s cottonwoods, box elder trees, and coyote willows line and define the riverbanks like nowhere else in the Colorado River Basin. And even though the alien tree from Eurasia, tamarisk, has invaded the canyon, the natives are holding their own in Desolation’s middle reaches. Those ancient cottonwoods offer the river traveler a bit of camping paradise.

Some unique natural features hide in the Green’s sediment-laden waters: Desolation’s endangered native-fish populations, especially the Colorado pikeminnow. These are the most endemic of any native fish in the United States. Thanks to the free-flowing Yampa River, some of Desolation’s native fish are hanging on a little better than elsewhere in the basin, although their future is uncertain. Competition from nonnatives, which comprise 90 percent of the river’s fish population, poses the greatest threat.

The populations of birds and mammals around the river are relatively healthy. There are too many species to mention here, but this chapter highlights a few, especially bears, since they keep making headlines in Utah newspapers. Had there been Utah headlines almost two hundred years ago, beavers would most likely have made them. They figured prominently in the fur trappers’ story. Other animals are discussed in the last chapter, which details government and tribal efforts to manage and, in some cases, restore wildlife, including coyotes, native fish, bison, and endangered birds such as the southwestern willow flycatcher.

Geology

Whether people realize it or not, they come to the canyons for geology. Layer upon layer of sedimentary rock frames every view. Yet few bother to learn even the basics of Tavaputs Plateau geologic history. It is actually a relatively simple history, compared with other regions in the world. Yet geologists are still working out many of the details of the canyon’s past, and the definitive story of Desolation’s geological history has yet to be told. New research will keep revising the narrative.

Three time periods reveal themselves at the river’s edge. The first and longest by far—fifty million years—is represented by the shales, sandstones, and marlstones laid down between ninety and forty million years ago (MYA). Most of those sediments formed from Lake Uinta toward the end of the Eocene epoch; no sediments from forty to two MYA appear in the canyon. The second time period on display is the past two to three million years, during which the Colorado Plateau rose, tipping up toward the southwest. This uplift allowed the Green and Colorado and their tributary rivers to carve Desolation and the other dramatic canyons of the plateau. The third time period is the recent past, characterized by debris flows surging out of side canyons, incising the river, and creating alluvial bottoms and rapids.¹ River runners experience this current phase with their bodies as they splash through rapids.

Traveling south down the river—the saw that cut the canyons—means traveling back in geological time. The earliest period of Desolation’s geologic history thus appears at the downstream end at Swasey’s Rapid. Because of the Colorado Plateau’s tipping, you must actually head upstream to follow the chronological story of exposed rocks in the canyon. All of Desolation’s rocks are sedimentary, deposited from ancient seas, lakes, and rivers, and a river trip descends through their beds as it proceeds downstream.²

Layer upon layer of sedimentary rock frames every view.

The oldest beds were left by an ocean called the Mancos Sea. This sea alternately retreated and advanced, flooding much of North America. It extended from the Northwest into Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, parts of New Mexico, Texas, and even farther. Its western border lapped against mountains in western Utah: the Sevier orogenic belt. Remnants of this 105-million-year-old range still stretch the length of the state from Cache County to Iron County.³ Its sediments drained eastward into the Mancos Sea. Later, those sandstones and shales extended farther into the retreating sea, although only intermittently. After ten million years, as the sea retreated, coastal floodplains and swamps formed at the eastern edge of the Sevier belt and western edge of the Mancos Sea. Those swamps became the coal beds visible in Gray Canyon.

The various layers of that shoreline comprise most of the walls in Gray Canyon, from Three Fords Rapid to Swasey’s. Some were marine shelf deposits, some marine shoreline and tidal-flat sediments, some coastal-plain sands, and some alluvial-plain deposits.⁴ The entire twenty-million-year period bespeaks a long, fluctuating shoreline. No ice existed on the planet then. Sea levels were much higher than now. The coastline of the Sevier belt looked eastward to an opposite shore in the Appalachian Mountains. This was the world that the dinosaurs saw when the Chicxulub meteor slammed the planet off the coast of the Yucatan about sixty-five MYA. That meteor and the drastic climate changes it brought probably wiped out the dinosaurs. The seaway retreated to the south, leaving behind in eastern Utah some of the greatest dinosaur remains. Most of those are found south and north of Desolation, however.

About sixty-five MYA, Utah gradually changed from a marine to a terrestrial world. This boundary reveals itself dramatically at the end of Desolation Canyon and the beginning of Gray. As you row out of the tail waves of Three Fords Rapid, you enter the older marine environment of the Cretaceous. Behind you lies the younger terrestrial world of mountains, rivers, and lakes.

That terrestrial world of the Green River area featured a series of freshwater, inland lakes lasting from sixty-five to thirty-eight MYA. These lakes—the Flagstaff, North Horn, and especially Lake Uinta—drained the mountains that already stood in the west, the Sevier orogenic belt, and others rising to the north, south, and east. Called the Laramide orogeny, this mountain building was the biggest event in the recent geological history of the Intermountain West. It included the Uinta Mountains rising in the north, the San Rafael Swell mounding up in the southwest, the Monument Uplift to the south, and the Rocky Mountains emerging in the east.

All of these highlands drained into Lake Uinta, where they deposited the sediments of the North Horn, Flagstaff, Green River, Colton, and Uinta Formations. These are the predominant layers encountered heading upstream from the end of Desolation Canyon at Three Fords Rapid to Willow Creek. In the thickest layers—the Green River and Colton (or Wasatch) Formations—the rocks tell of long periods of Lake Uinta fluctuating between lake and shoreline deposits. The lake covered a very large area but was relatively shallow: less than one hundred feet. Fossils of turtles, fish, crocodiles, birds, mollusks, ostracods, algae, a myriad of insects and larvae, and plants appear in the various sediments of sandstone, marlstone, siltstone, and shale.⁵

Eventually, around thirty-eight MYA, the surrounding highlands sent down even more floods of coarse, clastic materials that filled Lake Uinta. These now-cemented sediments of the Uinta Formation appear near the beginning of Desolation Canyon at Willow Creek.⁶ The U.S. Geological Survey’s W. B. Cashion describes the stream deposits of the Uinta Formation as a classic collecting ground for Eocene fossil vertebrates.⁷

As the stream and lake deposits were buried and compacted