Friday Roger came to my house, and we started the drive to Utah. This is the last leg of my quest to paddle the entire length of the Green River. We had lunch in Steamboat Springs at McDonalds, and dinner at the brewery in Vernal. We both got lost trying to find the correct road to campground at Pelican lake. The correct route north of lake, county road 5500. We arrived just before sunset. The weather was nice, a little rain on the drive. Campground was only $10. We were alone until several RVs arrived at dusk.
In the morning we drove to the fish hatchery, part of the Ouray Wildlife refuge. Left a car at the fish hatchery. We then drove to Horseshoe bend. The last section was in terrible condition. At one point we stopped to put stones in a gully we had to cross. It was 5 hours of steady paddling; with 1.5mph current, we were averaging 3.3 mph. Lots of shallows, we ran aground some. Everything was slippery mud. We took a different road back. We ate dinner at McDonalds in Vernal, since the shuttle took us to town. We were tired when we got back to camp.
Sunday, we planned an easier day. We left my car at the oil tanks near the bridge at Ouray, the take out for the day. We got on the water about 10:30, and got off the water a little after three. So a shorter day of paddling. The river was about the same, but we did see a couple of elk crossing the river, which was impressive. We kept seeing and hearing Sandhill cranes. The shuttle from Ouray to the fish hatchery boat ramp was relatively short, which helped us get on the water earlier and generally made it a more relaxing day.
Monday, we had a long shuttle. We thought it would be two hours one way, including some, not too bad dirt road. We stopped briefly in Roosevelt, which appears to be an oil town. I got to the sand wash at about 11, but Roger got lost and arrived about noon. I enjoyed talking to Michelle, from Moab who is the volunteer ranger at sand wash. I made a wrong turn on the way out, which added more time. We stopped to eat at the subway in Roosevelt, and decided it was too late in the day to start paddling. We got back to the campsite around 4 pm. It was a wet day and rained on and off all night.
Tuesday we packed up and drove to the Ouray bridge. (Ouray UT). We got on the water at 9:50 am, using my boat. We paddled pretty steadily, making an average of 3.5 mph. As we went south the landscape changed from ranchland to canyons. There was a power boat that came by; they were scientists doing research on Pikeminmows. We played leapfrog with them for a while. Around 3 o’clock we started thinking about looking for a campsite, but agreed to continue paddling to 4 o’clock, but we were getting tired; in fact, we were so tired that we got turned around, and paddled upstream for a while, before we figured it out. We were puzzled as to why we weren’t making progress. The available campsites did not look good. They tended to have high vertical dirt walls with no easy way to go through them. There were also Tamarisk bushes to fight our way through. To cap it all, the edge of the water was slippery mud. Finally, we saw a large sandbar. There was still mud, but there were no Tamarisks, and no earthen cliff to surmount. We had no shade, but we were happy to stop; we had paddled 6 hours and 22 miles.
Wednesday we continued paddling to Sand Wash, about 13 miles. It was a little anticlimactic, but I was pleased to have paddled the entire length of the Green River, 700 miles, from Green River Lakes Wyoming, to the confluence with the Colorado in Canyonlands. We packed up and loaded the car. We rode the Sand Wash road out to pavement; the rain had noticeably damaged the road from the day before. We drove to the Microtel hotel in Vernal, took showers, and then went to Vernal Brewing for dinner.
Thursday was the drive home, with lunch at McDonalds in Steamboat Springs.
Thanks to Roger for his help and his photos.
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