Trekking across the trails of Wyoming puts you on the tracks of Native American tribes, explorer John Wesley Powell, Old West bandits, and New West adventure.
The heady scent of sagebrush hangs over the high desert of southwestern Wyoming, a rugged landscape that seems empty under the wide-open blue above. Wooly clouds drift over windswept ridges of sandstone and shale. Sparse patches of prairie grass surround the small towns of Rock Springs and Green River, whose remoteness imparts a peaceful feeling of freedom found only in the wilderness.
The town of Green River overlooks its namesake waterway, which eventually connects with the Colorado River in southeastern Utah.
But look closer, and you’ll see that this arid countryside is crisscrossed by the trails of travelers old and new. Situated between the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains, it’s a land of footpaths and thoroughfares, byways and river routes — and it has long attracted explorers and wanderers of every kind. Modern adventurers ride mountain bikes and ATVs along off-road tracks that climb through the Green River Valley. Sandboarders carve gritty runs into the dunes. Kayakers leave lazy wakes in the Green River’s waters, and wild horses race down desert pathways.
Voyagers have rested and refueled in Sweetwater County for centuries, just like today’s motorcyclists and rodeo athletes who stop at hotels on Interstate 80 — which was once the historic Lincoln Highway, America’s first transcontinental road. Built in 1913, the 3,000-mile motorway linked east with west and cut straight across the former frontier. The Wild West had vanished, but the legends were only beginning: the cowboy, the gunslinger, the notorious outlaw. One such outlaw was Butch Cassidy, who acquired his nickname while working at a butcher shop in Rock Springs. Like many bandits in the 1890s, Cassidy and his gang, the Wild Bunch, disappeared into the badlands south of the town on secret getaway routes. They turned ravines into hideouts like Minnie’s Gap, knowing that only the bravest, boldest daredevils would venture into the wilds of Wyoming.
Spirit of the Wild by KEY DETAIL in Rock Springs is one of many murals throughout Sweetwater County.
John Wesley Powell was just such a man. Appearing on the frontier a few decades before the Wild Bunch, Powell was a geologist and U.S. Army soldier who gained fame for his death-defying expedition through the Grand Canyon in 1869, the first of its kind. A statue of the one-armed explorer, ready for his next odyssey with paddle in hand, stands outside Sweetwater County Historical Museum in Green River. Like a three-legged dog, he takes zero notice of his missing limb — after all, there are rivers to conquer and mountains to climb.
A few blocks away you can visit the pretty park of Expedition Island, where Powell launched his boats into the unknown with a crew of 10. They endured hundreds of churning rapids, precipitous cliffs, mutiny, starvation, and hostile Native American tribes. Powell’s journey on the Green and Colorado Rivers passed some of the most impressive natural landmarks in the American West, many of which he named — including the spectacular Flaming Gorge.
The name is no exaggeration: The canyon walls blaze with brilliant red sandstone above the cool Green River Reservoir below. Straddling Wyoming and Utah, it’s a prime playground for trophy trout fishing, stand-up paddleboarding, and Powell-style float trips (minus the mutiny and starvation). Or you can simply drive the 150-mile loop around the lake, stopping at jaw-dropping vistas like the Red Canyon Overlook. If you’d rather watch for elk and mountain lions instead of keeping your eyes on the road, the Flaming Gorge Tour offers a guided bus trip with copious breaks for ice cream and artisanal donuts.
Explore the region’s natural and cultural heritage at the Sweetwater County Historical Museum, from ancient fossils to emigrant trails to weapons of the Wild West.
Powell had neither for his excursion. But he did have coffee and sugar hauled in by Union Pacific Railroad, which had just laid down tracks to Sweetwater County. The railroad’s arrival ignited the local coal mining economy, and shafts soon snaked underground. The region still produces coal, but much more trona, a sodium carbonate used to make glass, laundry detergent, and 90 percent of the baking soda in American kitchens today.
Rock Springs and Green River were shoo-ins for the railroad route because both towns were already stagecoach stops on the Overland Trail. Green River also had a Pony Express home station in the early 1860s. By that time, the path had already been blazed by two decades of American homesteaders as the country expanded west. The Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails all ran through Sweetwater County, which has more miles of visible pioneer tracks than any other county in the nation. Some can be seen at Fort Bridger, where mountain man Jim Bridger established a trading post and wagon trains stocked up on life-sustaining supplies before pushing into the mountains ahead. Now a living-history museum, Fort Bridger began life in 1843 as a fur trading post for trappers who had trickled through the area since the 1820s.
Get a bird’s-eye view of the Union Pacific Railyard on this pedestrian overpass linking downtown Green River with Expedition Island.
The first mountain men encountered not an empty landscape but one rich in Native American cultures. The Wyoming Basin (which covers most of the state) was the home of the Shoshone as well as an important hunting and raiding ground for the Blackfeet, Bannock, Arapaho, Crow, Sioux, Ute, and Cheyenne. You can feel the presence of the Indigenous peoples who traversed the region at White Mountain Petroglyphs, a 300-foot-tall sandstone formation located down a rough dirt road north of Rock Springs. Hundreds of etchings cover the sheer rock face: elk, buffalo, horses, hunters, tepees, and tiny human feet. Most are estimated to be 200 to 1,000 years old, and all are up for interpretation. One enigmatic theory holds that White Mountain was a sacred birthing place for women of multiple tribes. This idea is given weight by the site’s star attraction, an outcropping embedded with numerous handprints. The prints sink deep into the soft sandstone, like so many fingers had grasped and gripped the rock again and again during childbirth.
Standing proudly in the countryside, the petroglyphs’ silent stories are a powerful testament to the Native Americans who came before. The earliest of them arrived here in the Wyoming Basin an estimated 13,000 years ago, long after the lava flows of ancient volcanoes had turned into massive mounds of sand. You can surf them at Killpecker Sand Dunes, where you can bring your own dune buggy, dirt bike, or ATV to make your own tracks across 11,000 acres of designated “open play area” in an ecologically sensitive area that is otherwise off-limits to such vehicular entertainment.
[Left] Handprints worn deep into the rock evoke an intimate connection with those who used the site long ago. [Right] You can see hundreds of etchings in the soft sandstone walls, including animals, tiny footprints, and geometric forms.
A land of trails since the Mesozoic “Age of the Reptiles” some 66 million years ago, the Wyoming Basin is perhaps unsurprisingly one of the world’s most productive dinosaur sites. This paleontological piece of the West has been attracting visitors since time immemorial, and it continues to appeal to travelers and explorers. Some of them are looking considerably forward: A few eclectic souls plan to welcome inhabitants of the planet Jupiter at the Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport, a public airstrip and alien sanctuary — or at least a bona fide roadside attraction. A mashup of distant prehistory and unfathomable future in the selfsame spot on planet Earth. It’s oddly fitting. Here, the record of geologic time is on full display; the layers of rock that pushed up and up over the eons create the gorges and ravines that now providea dramatic backdrop for whatever travelers might traverse this singular landscape now and in ages to come. One thing is certain: No matter which path you choose in southwestern Wyoming, you follow in extraordinary footsteps.
The White Mountain Petroglyphs Site is sacred to members of multiple Plains and Great Basins tribes.
Check out C&I’s Wyoming travel guide.
From our August/September 2024 issue.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Shilo Urban
