{the place} WHERE a RIVER is BORN.
deep in the Wind River Range, Wyoming
“We should be prepared to regard silences on maps as something more than the mere absence of something else. I am deliberately insisting on the term silences in the context of maps, rather than the somewhat negative blank spaces of the older literature, for the reason that silence should be seen as an ‘active human performance.’”
~J.B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps
The three of us, Matt, Ben and myself, were set to do another trip now a couple of years ago, back in 2021. The year before, we had a blast on a one-hundred-and-fifty mile route through the southern Sierras, during the height of the pandemic. But then in 2021 our ride, Matt’s iconic Cessna 210, sprung a leak in the engine and was out for the count. For our trip that year we needed it to get us to Pinedale, Wyoming. Driving was out of the question given our combined time constraints. A bolt was holding up the Cessna’s repair for the better part of the year. A very special bolt.
So we threw out alternate trip ideas, from the Sierras on repeat to the northern Okanogan. For my part concocting an alternative, I traced a crazy figure-8 across a map of the remote Pickets in the North Cascades. It stuck with Matt and Ben. We were set to head out the second week in August. Until a questionable (how it was started, not over its existence) wildfire broke out mere miles from the trail we’d be hiking. The park service closed our trailhead.
A trip for us in the mountains that year wasn’t meant to be.
Fast-forward to spring 2022. We naturally circled back to our idea of a high route through the Winds. This route had also been my idea, born from an article in Alpinist magazine. A photo, more accurately, taken from Island Lake. I had been there before. The Winds, not Island Lake. Twice. That particular photo captured I guess for me the wildness of a place I’ve only barely explored. There was much to be seen.
With Matt’s Cessna up and running, logistics were pretty straightforward. He’d take off with Ben thirty minutes north and pick me up at Pangborn. Then we’d make the three-and-a-half hour flight to Pinedale.
Matt used his logistics prowess and snagged us the only remaining rental car at Ralph Wenz Field, a still-had-that-new-car-smell Ford which, despite that felt almost dated. We drove first west then north along an inkling of the Green River to the end of the dusty road to meet our shuttle driver. It was the first time I had seen the Green since glimpsing it high above from Island In The Sky far, far south of this place where it was born.
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The Shoshone called the Wind River Basin U Ah Die: “Warm Valley.” The sound the “Big Wind River” made rushing from its gorge, Beya Oigua. And Pingora, arguably the most prominent spire in an alpine playground of impressive rocks aptly named the Wind River Range, for "high, rocky inaccessible peak or tower.”
Sweeping then from its headwaters buried deep in the range, the impressive Green River descends into Utah, flows east to Colorado before turning back into Utah as it carves a path through a dramatic and varied landscape of mountains, canyons and desert for over seven hundred miles. The fact the Colorado carries a more prominent standing than the Green boils down to politics. As Wikipedia states:
The status of the Green River as a tributary of the Colorado River came about mainly for political reasons. In earlier nomenclature, the Colorado River began at its confluence with the Green River. Above the confluence, the Colorado was called the Grand River. In 1921, U.S. Representative Edward T. Taylor of Colorado petitioned the Congressional Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce to rename the Grand River as the Colorado River. On July 25, 1921, the name change was made official in House Joint Resolution 460 of the 66th Congress, over the objections of representatives from Wyoming and Utah and the United States Geological Survey, which noted that the drainage basin of the Green River was more extensive than that of the Grand River, although the Grand carried a higher volume of water at its confluence with the Green.
A higher volume of water at their confluence. Politics and volume. Whatever, the Green has carved some of the most spectacular canyons in the country. And it’s the Green that has captured my imagination, and my fascination.
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winding through the canyons it created below the White Rim
I visited Island In The Sky in Canyonlands National Park during autumn of 2020 and again in 2022. Like the canyons of the Colorado hide it mostly from view, so too do those of the Green. There are a couple of spots though, still a thousand feet above the next level of the great Colorado Plateau, where the Green River is actually visible. The river, the water, brown and reflecting the light of the high desert sky, bright. Just a couple. A pullout, sort of secret, and an official viewpoint aptly named Green River Overlook. From both, the river twists and turns two thousand feet below, miles away.
It’s an incredible sight.
More incredible, giddy I was even, was stepping over it, still a trickle, seven hundred miles to the north of Canyonlands. Washing my hands. Filling my water bottle. Seeing, absolutely, where it was born.
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clings to life on the north face of Sulphur Peak
It was the fifth day of our trip traversing the Wind Rivers, southeast to northwest. We had crossed the Continental Divide four times. At Indian Pass, the fourth, we found ourselves again and for the remainder of our trip on the west side, where water flowed to the Pacific. We were close to where the Green was born.
The following day we wound through Titcomb Basin. A world-class destination, it was for me a means to an end. We climbed over talus, watching the weather, at the head of the basin. Rain appeared, whilst the trail faded and disappeared. A col, high above, stood between us and the the beginning of the Green River basin. A family with a couple of kids passed us on their way down into Titcomb. A gal and her partner were inching their way up to the col, only to turn around, gripped. It was a steep climb.
Gaining the top, we ran into a pair of hikers traversing the range in the opposite direction, north to south. While Matt and Ben chatted with them, I inched away, to the other side of the col with a view west. A view to Sulphur Peak. Clinging to its north face was the Stroud Glacier, from where it’s credited what would become the Green River began. As ice, melting, flowing then as water.
I just sat there.
I could see through the basin and at its end, a glimpse of Peak Lake, our intended camp for the night. There was an innocuous meltwater pond at the base of the glacier, a dull green. Milky. From that, a waterfall. Small, innocent. Over the silence of the empty valley ahead, I could hear the water, flowing. It had a great journey ahead. Through a basin filled with wildflowers to a lake, to pause, to gather itself, before the thousands of miles that would take it to the sea. Through the great canyons it would carve. From the mountains a stone’s throw from the Divide across deserts and plateaus. It’s like its fate was to make it to the Pacific. The Atlantic just wouldn’t do. It couldn’t contain the Green.
Matt and Ben bade farewell to the duo heading south. We three all then turned to find our way down, into the basin that carried the beginnings of the Green. A quick stop for lunch on a bench, almost level with that meltwater pond, now out of sight. Those two headed off in conversation. I hung back, intentionally. It was a spectacular afternoon, and I didn’t want it to end. We’d easily make it to Peak Lake so there was no rush.
I just couldn’t believe where I was, what was flowing next to me. A creek, really. Barely moving, but with an unseen power. I could feel it. At one point, still above Peak Lake and under the shadow of Sulphur Peak, it gathered into a small pool. The green cast of the water, full of glacial silt, was unmistakable. The col where we stood an hour or so ago seemed far off in the distance, high above. An impossible climb.
Eventually, I joined Matt and Ben at Peak Lake. That particular afternoon is still etched in my mind, always. I brewed an espresso. We all jumped in the lake, bitter cold and clear. The light and the shadows and the time, like it never was and never will be again. Shafts of sunlight stretched from behind the ridge of Sky Pilot Peak to the west, through the clouds, never-ending. Quiet. The color of the lake green as the meltwater pond, only brighter. And much bigger. It was from here I sensed the Green really began.
We stayed up late that night. Matt was trying for a photograph of us in our tents under an otherwise ink-black sky, full of stars. It was the last night of our trip, after all. The following morning, we’d hop over a small pass, followed by another, that would put us momentarily one valley over from where the Green started its fall to the ocean. We rejoined it, crossed it on a backcountry bridge, then walked alongside as it continued to gather strength, slowly, filling Upper and Lower Green River Lakes. My heels started to blister. I swatted at grasshoppers, hundreds of them. The final miles.
Shadows swept across the otherwise still surface of Upper Green River Lake, immense. Squaretop Mountain stood guard of the Winds, of the headwaters, of where the Green came to be. To the north, endless prairie. Rolling hills above the slow-moving river. Campers dotted the landscape all around. Cloud shadows. End of summer green-almost-yellow fields. Stands of pine. Eventually, home.
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This story hasn’t ended, only begun. I’ve now seen the birth of the river, hidden from ordinary view. A great effort. In time, I need to see its end, where the Green collides, gently, with the Colorado, deep in the heart of Canyonlands, similarly and properly hidden from view. Where there is magic and beauty to be found in the birth of a river, so is there in where it meets another. And finally, with a sigh, the ocean.
where it will eventually merge with the Colorado River
