Flaming Gorge

The canyon system ahead takes its name from a dispatch written by a one-armed Civil War veteran floating through it in eighteen sixty-nine. John Wesley Powell led the first scientific expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers that year, ten men in four wooden boats leaving from the railroad town of Green River, Wyoming, in late May. When they entered this red-walled gorge Powell recorded in his journal that the cliffs looked like they were on fire, and he named it Flaming Gorge.

Powell's party were the first non-Native people known to travel the full length of these canyons. His expedition named dozens of landmarks and produced the first reliable maps of the Colorado River system. The Bureau of Reclamation dammed the gorge in nineteen sixty-four, filling Powell's flaming canyon with a ninety-one-mile reservoir. The red Uinta Mountain quartzite walls he described still frame the water.