Uinta-Wasatch-Cache: The Only East-West Range in the Lower Forty-Eight

Most major mountain ranges in the continental United States run roughly north and south. The Rockies, the Sierra Nevada, the Cascades, the Appalachians, all of them oriented more or less along meridians, shaped by the forces of plate tectonics in ways that produce north-south grain. The Uinta Mountains in northeastern Utah are the highest range in the lower forty-eight that runs east to west. They run east to west for roughly one hundred and fifty miles, and they do so for geological reasons that are still being studied.

The Uintas contain the highest point in Utah, Kings Peak at thirteen thousand five hundred and twenty-eight feet, and they hold the largest glacially-carved landscape in the state, the High Uintas Wilderness, which at four hundred and sixty thousand acres is the largest wilderness area in the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest.

The forest itself is an administrative amalgamation covering roughly two million acres from the Wyoming border down the Wasatch Front to the canyons east of Salt Lake City, and it includes the Bonneville Shoreline, the ancient beach line left by Lake Bonneville, the enormous Pleistocene lake that filled much of the Great Basin and of which the Great Salt Lake is a shrinking remnant.

The High Uintas were used by Ute and Shoshone bands as summer hunting grounds and as passages between the Great Basin and the plains east of the Rockies. The terrain was too high and harsh for year-round habitation, but the wildlife, the bison that once ranged the mountain parks, the elk, the bear, brought people into the high country every summer for thousands of years. Kings Peak is rarely climbed by anyone who does not want to be in a very quiet place for a very long time. It is still that.