Expedition Island
Near Rock Springs, Wyoming
This small island in the Green River at Green River, Wyoming, is where one of the great American exploring expeditions began. On May twenty-fourth, eighteen sixty-nine, Major John Wesley Powell pushed off from this bank with nine men and four wooden boats, heading into territory no American expedition had ever mapped. Three months and nearly a thousand miles later, Powell and five of his crew became the first people to run the length of the Green and Colorado rivers all the way through the Grand Canyon.
The journey transformed American understanding of the arid West and launched a career in conservation and water policy that shaped how the United States managed its rivers for a century. Powell launched a second expedition from the same spot in eighteen seventy-one. The island was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen sixty-eight.
