Utah Canoeing Trip – Days 16-17, May 24-25

Days 2-3 on the river

It probably seems like the blog just kind of disappeared, huh? Well, as you’ll learn I had a hectic trip home and eventually managed to spill a glass of lemonade into my desktop PC, which had all of my pictures on it. Yeah, they are all backed up and I did some acrobatics to get the disks mounted to my server, images transferred to my laptop, etc. Now I’m back up and running again.

I’ve sorted through several hundred pics to share my favorites and will spread them over a few posts to avoid dumping them all at once. I know you will enjoy these but I even more so hope this inspires someone to get out and do a trip of their own to share.

 

A Little About the Local Geology

730 miles in length, the Green river originates in northern Wyoming, touches Colorado briefly for 40 miles, winds through Utah and then flows into the Colorado river. We paddled a total of 120 miles with the last few miles being after the confluence with the Colorado, so this is the very southernmost section. The basin (watershed) of the Green River is an intermontane (among/between the mountains) desert roughly 20,000 square miles in size and covers parts of each state in which it flows. In the area we spent our time, the exposed sedimentary rock was deposited around 300 million years ago. Today, surface elevation is 5000 ft due to various uplifts and deposition of rock and sediment by sea ingress/outgress, rain, rivers and wind. The Canyonlands and Arches National Park Visitor’s Centers have great visuals of their best guesses as to how everything came together. Erosion by the Green River took place over some millions of years, exposing this rock along the river to create a window into 300 million years of geologic change. Considering the universe is estimated to be 13 billion years old and earth is put at 4.5 billion years, this 0.3 billion year window creates a context in which you have to think on a very different scale than we encounter in a typical day, month or year. If there was an overarching theme to our trip, this was it. Dozens of times every day we just looked on in awe, speechless.

 

A Couple of Days of Pictures

The general terrain is rocky with various brush, often tamarisk (dang it) and rarely cottonwood trees. Pretty much the only shade you can find is next to a rock or under a cottonwood. Given the movement of the sun, rocks are rarely shade long enough to suffice for a good camp. We spent most of our days in camp reading, hiking, eating or talking so having a well shaded spot was essential. Along most of the river, tamarisk has taken over and grown so thick that you literally can’t get out of a canoe and onto the shore except in very rare spots. This led to one of the focal points of each day being to find a good camp spot. When we found a great spot, we called it a day!

 

 

 

 

 

There were several uranium mines in the area that were active during the cold war era of the 60’s and 70’s. Most of these mines shut down because uranium was more economically viable elsewhere but there is still some old equipment and a couple of small mine openings visible in the area.