spend two days getting to know its crooked path during a 55-mile paddle.
Those two days easily could be spent on and around Green River Lakes, though. Sagebrush- and aspen-flecked mountainsides rim half of the 463-acre lower lake, while towering conifers cloak the soaring cliffs that ring the rest. To the southeast, a gap in the mountains frames Square Top, an 11,695-foot plug of a mountain still streaked, here in mid-June, with snow.
Paddling up the short channel that binds the two lakes, Jim King and I quickly break a sweat against a current that is gaining momentum under the early summer runoff. It’s in mid-stroke, roughly 150 yards up the channel, when we spot three moose browsing beneath Square Top on the stream’s edge. Drawn to the sedges, willows and wildflower salad lining the banks, these hulking members of the deer family are content to while the day away grazing and napping by the river’s edge. Two more moose, across the river in a meadow beyond the first three, seem to agree.
Back at the channel’s mouth, trout lurk in search of catching bugs and water-borne larvae that might get washed through the channel. In the trees circling the lake, bald eagles and osprey rest between fishing forays. Hidden by the forests hemming the river and lakes, elk, mountain lion and black and grizzly bears roam. Wolves lope about the ecosystem as well, having drifted down from northwestern Wyoming.
With my camera full of moose, we turn the canoe about and head towards the lake’s outlet. Having run the Snake River through Grand Teton National Park and portions of the Green and Colorado in Utah, we’ve come to explore the upper Green and gain an understanding of why it has been nominated for inclusion on the national list of wild and scenic rivers.
Once one of the West’s mightiest rivers, the Green River now struggles in places to capture that image. Along its 760 miles, dams and diversions have sapped its strength and ranches, croplands, towns and homesteads have encroached upon its banks.
Today, a small fragment of the river, less than a tenth of its total length, flows as full of life as it has since the glacial retreat. Unfettered by dams, this stretch of river follows the course through the upper Green River valley much as it always has, drawing its personality from the landscape through which it passes.
At times the flow surges in cascades over glacial debris, then slows in sprawling valleys where the stream rests in lazy, looping meanders. To the east the jagged Wind River Range with its gray cathedrals of stone rises 13,000 feet and more, while the more muted, heavily treed Gros Ventre Range rolls to the west. Between them runs the Green, gaining volume as the Roaring Fork, Red Creek, Teepee Creek and Eagle Creek and other tributaries toss in their snow- and icemelt. Willows crowd the streambanks, with the itinerant cottonwood giving height to the river bottom.
For two decades there’s been talk about providing a measure of protection for the river’s first 37 miles. Twenty years ago the National Rivers Inventory suggested that the upper 12 miles of river, from the first imitation of a stream down to Green River Lakes, had the potential to be designated a “wild” river. The report added that the next 25 miles, down to the boundary of the Bridger-Teton National Forest, merited “scenic” classification.
Today the river’s potential for those designations remains just that. Congress has yet to see a bill that would officially confer those designations. Within this legislative vacuum, development is slowly, steadily, decidedly encroaching on the river.
“It’s changing faster than I ever expected it to,” Linda Baker, a long-time Pinedale resident and conservationist, tells me. “Ten years ago I thought that we wouldn’t be seeing any impacts, any huge changes in our population or our community for probably 20, 30 years. And I’m seeing it now, faster and bigger than I ever thought.”
Change certainly seems inevitable. So far, though, the upper Green has demonstrated amazing resiliency to the human waves lapping at its banks. Though not as much in a hurry as the Snake River, the upper Green can be just as demanding in places. Navigable only on the high, roiling waters of spring runoff, and then only by paddlers comfortable with Class 3 waters, the river is more popular with anglers than canoeists and kayakers.
With these issues on our minds as we near the lower lake’s outlet, a sure-handed pry turns us downstream and we coast on the river as it slips out of the mountains on a passage that eventually will tame its wildness.
That taming isn’t evident on the upper Green. In early summer the river corridor is flush with wildlife, from the moose, bald eagles and osprey that we saw upstream, to a well-feathered menagerie downstream. As Jim and I thread our way through the rock gardens that create a watery maze for several miles below Roaring Fork, our eyes are constantly drawn to bird life – mergansers, pintails, teals, and osprey. The river sets a rich buffet for them with its caddisflies and other insects and tiny minnows that dart about the cobbled bottom.
Brown and rainbow trout also swim these waters. Several times we pause from our paddling to watch as an osprey hovers high over the river, talons outstretched, searching the depths for a meal.
Beavers, which fueled the fur trade in the early 1800s and made the Green River a popular setting for rambunctious trapper rendezvouses, still ply the river’s waters. Dotting the river banks their stick-built lodges, grey from weathering, are architectural wonders of the animal world. Size reflects age of the inhabitants, as towering lodges that crawl ten feet and more back from the river and rise five feet up obviously were raised over a number of building seasons, while smaller lodges might belong to 2-year-olds out on their own for the first time.
Literature claims beavers are nocturnal creatures, but throughout the daylight hours we spot a surprising number of these 40-to-60-pound cousins to squirrels. Some are hard at work, others snoozing in the sun, a few paddling down the river themselves, their brown fur matted sleeky against their bodies. Sandhill cranes also favor the river’s meanders and the wetlands they foster, as do great blue herons and nomadic grebe.
That night, encamped on a sprawling meadow dotted with what appear to be buttercups, the cranes chortle back and forth with their incessant gar-oo-oo, and once evening begins to settle the nighthawks take to the air to pluck insects for dinner, their nasal calls reverberating across the skies. Not to be left out of this wildlife symphony, an unseen pack of coyotes announce themselves with a boisterous chorus of yips and yowls.
Unperturbed by it all, a young pronghorn antelope silently grazes the spring vegetation along a fence line not far from our camp. Down on the riverside getting water for dinner, I encounter another local, a badger who hisses his displeasure with me before darting in a huff back into the sagebrush.
Before we get underway the following morning, the beavers are already at work, navigating the glassy river in search of food and lodge-building materials. We surprise one as we glide down near the bank, interrupting its sun bath. In a flash the beaver plunges into the river, only to be spooked again by the canoe’s shadow, which causes it to swiftly change course in escape.
Beyond the first stretch of rapids, we enjoy a steady paddle along the smooth river, marveling at both the clear water and the undulating river bottom. At one point cobbles that past spring torrents pushed out of the Winds line the bottom, but that quickly changes to finer sands and silts before giving way inexplicably to cobbles again.
The river’s depth varies as well, from shoals to holes and back again. These patterns repeat themselves over and again, reminding me that I should have studied geology in college. In many places shallowly submerged sand bars run parallel to the current, but we find one that crosses the river, precipitating a deep hole in the river bottom just downstream.
It’s while using ropes from the shore to guide the canoe through a particularly rocky labyrinth below Kendall Warm Springs, a geothermal feature that makes little impact on the Green’s cold waters with its warm runoff, that a trumpeter swan wings past us. Not 10 feet above the river, the elegant bird’s 6-foot wingspan beats out a steady cadence on its upstream path.
An hour or two later, during a water break when we let the currents take the canoe where they might, Jim spies a newborn mule deer fawn nestled in the grass on the bank’s edge. Its buff-colored back is speckled white, a natural-born chessboard that blends in deceptively with the grasses. Ahead of us a flotilla of mergansers dashes across the river’s surface, wings beating rapidly and webbed feet slapping the water in search of the momentum to get airborne.
Barb Franklin tries to keep tabs on the wildlife for the U.S. Forest Service. A wildlife biologist based in Big Piney, Wyoming, she never is at a loss for words when asked about the river corridor. There’s two bald eagle nests, Franklin tells me, a trumpeter swan nest just off the river, and numerous osprey nests.
“Then you get down into the waterfowl and shorebirds and the neo-tropical migrants. It’s a really, really rich environment, because it’s got everything – those big willow bottoms up through sagebrush, aspen, conifer, it’s just great habitat,” says the biologist.
As Jim and I navigate the meanders, it’s easy to see that moose agree with Franklin’s assessment of the habitat. Willows that cover the meadows and river banks have been lopped off uniformly, shrub-sized by the voracious animals. We even get to see this behavior in action, as one bend in the river brings us in view of a cow and her calf enjoying a midday snack of willows. Although we’re floating down the middle of the river, a good 30 feet from shore, mamma moose acts as if we’ve barged in on their luncheon and disappears with her calf into the willow thickets.
If not for the occasional homes that pop up along the river banks below the forest boundary, we might have been traveling a river corridor as wild as any in the country.
Back in Washington, D.C., the conservation group American Rivers keeps tabs on the health and vitality of the country’s rivers. When it can, it lobbies for qualified stretches of river to be protected under the National Rivers Inventory. Jack Hannon, the group’s general counsel, doubles as its wild and scenic rivers program coordinator. He’s not terribly surprised that no designation has been granted the Green River.
“I think even a study bill in the West raises the potential for some controversy,” he tells me several days after I return home from the river. “There are broader issues about impact on private land, on water rights, and whether this would require new (water) allocations.”
Across the country, more than 170 sections of rivers have formally been given protection as either ‘wild,’ ‘scenic’ or ‘recreational’ under the national wild and scenic rivers legislation. While more than 100 river segments in Wyoming have been inventoried for one of those three designations, only one, a 20.5-mile stretch along the Clark’s Fork of the Yellowstone River, has managed to gain designation.
Despite the 20 years that have passed since the Green was first inventoried for inclusion in this elite list, Hannon resists my suggestion that the bid to officially list the river among the country’s wild and scenic streams is languishing.
“There’s probably a thousand (rivers) on this nationwide river inventory. To move it on to designation, it takes a local group that’s really interested and willing to work really hard on it,” he explains. “Sometimes it takes a threat. Often a proposed dam will move things along, because of course wild and scenic status prevents the licensing of new dams by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
“It doesn’t mean that because the Green hasn’t moved into wild and scenic status that it’s been written off. It probably means that it hasn’t been threatened,” says Hannon.
Back in Pinedale, Linda Baker sees threats to the river on the horizon – growing population, talk of damming a section, gas development – and wonders how long the upper Green can hang onto its identity.
“I really think that if designation as a wild and scenic river is attainable, that we can maintain a lot of the characteristics that we see today,” she says. “I don’t know if that’s possible or not.”
The last stretch of river that runs to our destination, Warren Bridge, takes us through “the Narrows.” Somewhat tight with rising cliffs that make a shallow canyon, this section at least will retain its characteristics, as it’s too steep for development. But the water already is thin, with runoff sketchy, and any more diversions could turn the Green into a pebble beach through the canyon.
For now, though, the river’s first 67 miles run just about as wild and free as they ever have.
Copyright 2005 Kurt Repanshek
