Utah's landscape is incredibly diverse and so is its wildlife.   However you like to experience nature, Utah offers plenty of options from relaxed wildlife viewing and photography, to active adventures like rafting, backpacking or hunting.   Any time you’re outdoors, you may have the opportunity to see some of the state’s over 700 wildlife species, 250 species of birds, 620 species of spiders, 9 species of scorpions, so keep your eyes peeled.   Mammals are the most abundant animal species in the state since they exist in almost all regions.   There isn’t just one way to enjoy nature and wildlife.   Lace up your hiking boots, grab your fishing pole, pack your binoculars, and get ready to enjoy!   Remember safety should always be your first priority.   Getting close to animals is dangerous for both the animal and you.   Respect nature.   Remember these are wild animals and some are poisonous.

Mammal species include mule deer, brown bear, mountain goat, antelope, mountain bison, black bear, wild horses,lynx, moose, long-tailed weasel, cougar, mountain lion, badger, gray wolf, bighorn sheep, llamas, coyote, elk, wolf, sage grouse, squirrel, mink, muskrat, ferret, gopher, otter, skunks, porcupine, raccoon, wolverine, shrews, pika, marmot, vole, rabbits, birds, swans, hawk, falcon, vulture, owls, blue heron, wild turkey, roadrunner, pelican, condor, bulfrogs, bats, and foxes.   Also numerous species of spiders, snakes, scorpions, butterflies, moths, and bees.   Reptiles like lizards, desert tortoise, gila monster, salamander, gecho, iguana, turtles, and many more species that call the state of Utah and its national parks home.   As for lakes, rivers, and streams you can find several species of fish including whitefish, crappie, bluegill, trout, catfish, carp, june & bluehead sucker, and mollusks.












































Stop and smell the roses, so the saying goes.   That may work in the English countryside, but here in the Beehive State, it’s Utah wildflowers that deserve notice.   Scene stealers like lupine, sego lilies, mountain sunflowers, columbine, and paintbrush share the stage with fragrant forests and gurgling creeks in the north, and desert breezes and red rock canyons to the south.   Altogether, finding wildflowers is a rewarding, multi-sensory performance worth the hike.   The optimal time to view Utah wildflowers depends on temperature and elevation.   Wildflowers can bloom in Utah anytime between March and September.   At higher-elevation meadows, peak season is June, July and August.

Flowers also bring out the butterflies and moths as they show us their colors.   There are so many kinds of butterflies in Utah!   Rocky Mountain states such as Utah rank as some of the best butterfly destinations in the United States.   The east-west divide means that the eastern slopes of the state attract many of the eastern butterflies and the western slopes, valleys and fields support entirely different butterfly populations.   Butterflies have been icons of peace and reverence for millennia.   There are eight different families to which butterflies belong- at least 250 species of which are found in Utah.














































The Bear River is the largest tributary to the Great Salt Lake. Its volume at times reaches 1.4 million acre feet of water. Beginning in Utah's Uinta Mountains, the swift-falling stream first heads north and then changes into a slow meandering stream in Wyoming. It then flows west into Idaho and south into Utah. After flowing nearly 500 miles, it finally empties into Bear River Bay of the Great Salt Lake, ending ninety miles from its place of beginning. Shoshoni Indians lived near the Bear River before Anglo settlement. They were primarily hunter/gatherers who occasionally traded and fought with Cheyenne, Crow, and Blackfoot tribes. The fur trade brought white trappers to the area. In 1812 Robert Stuart, returning from Astoria, Oregon, heard stories from white men on the Snake River of a river to the south; he was persuaded to take a look at what he later called Miller's River, named after his guide, Joseph Miller. William Sublette led a party in 1824 from the Green River to Soda Springs, the Bear River's northernmost point. So colorful were the stories of the Bear River that the trappers' rendezvous of 1825 and 1827 were held here. Jedediah Smith attended the 1827 rendezvous after his ill-fated California trip. Peter Skene Ogden locally directed the Hudson's Bay Company policy to rid the region of furs in order to discourage American traders and settlers. Other famous trappers who visited the Bear River include B.L.E. Bonneville, Zenos Leonard, Black Harris, and Osborn Russell. Missionaries who visited the river included Jason and Daniel Lee as well as Father Jean Paul De Smet. John Charles Fremont explored the area in 1843 and his report helped prepare the Mormons for their new life in the West. Some Mormons thought they were coming west to settle the Bear River Valley. They explored the mouth of the Bear in April 1848 in the Mud Hen, a fifteen-foot skiff built from fir planks and launched in the Jordan River at Salt Lake City. The next year, Howard Stansbury and John W. Gunnison, U.S. Topographical Engineers, took Albert Carrington and a crew of men on a circumnavigational expedition of the Great Salt Lake. Their craft was left high on a mud flat in the Bear River Bay when a sudden April snowstorm nearly took their lives. In 1863, during the Civil War, Colonel Patrick Connor took troops north from Salt Lake to Cache Valley in order to chastise some Bannock (Shoshone) Indians who had been raiding emigrant wagon trains. Connor surprised the Indians' winter encampment on the Bear River and killed 250 Indians in what has come to be viewed as a controversial and terrible action. The James A. Garfield, a paddle-wheeler, carried ore from the south shore of the Great Salt Lake up the Bear River as far as Corinne for transshipment by rail before 1874. Geologists John W. Powell and G.K. Gilbert reported as early as 1878 that the Bear River waters would generate controversy. The truth of their foresight was proven when one of the first stream-gauging stations in the U.S. was established at Collinston in 1889. Farmers in Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah wanted as much water as they could get and power companies filed for rights. Coming close to Bear Lake but not part of it, the River was joined by an inlet in 1918 in order that river waters could be stored in the lake. Under the 1955 Bear River Compact water rights have been redefined and use is regulated more to the users' satisfaction.







The Colorado River is one of the most important water systems in the United States. Draining watersheds from seven western states, it is divided into two major districts, the Upper Basin comprised of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico, and the Lower Basin formed by Nevada, Arizona, and California. With its headwaters in Wyoming and Colorado and its mouth (until recently) flowing into the Gulf of California, this river serves as a focal point for both prehistoric and historic events in the West. The Colorado courses through Utah in a southwesterly direction and has two major tributaries, the Green and San Juan rivers, with smaller, additional sources flowing in from east and west. During prehistoric times it constituted a permeable boundary between the Anasazi populations to the south and east, and the Fremont and western Anasazi populations to the northwest and west, respectively. The Anasazi farmed tributary canyons and alluvial bottom lands where soil was rich and water adequate. These early Indians also created a system of trails that crossed both the San Juan and Colorado rivers. Spanish and Anglo-Americans later used some of these paths in their exploration and settlement of the West. Historic Native American groups living along the Colorado include the Paiute in southwestern Utah, the Ute in southeastern Utah, and the Navajo south and east of the confluence of the San Juan and the Colorado. This latter group has a rich body of lore concerning the river, which they say has a female spirit name "Life Without End." She, and her male counterpart, the San Juan, form a protective boundary that skirts the reservation lands. In the past, Navajo ceremonies like the Blessingway provided protection for events and locations within this area, while beyond this line Enemyway and Evilway applied. Navajo raids across these rivers were a common occurrence during the 1850s and 1860s, and to a lesser extent in the 1870s. The Spaniards provided the first documented information about the Colorado, giving the river various names, such as El Rio de Cosninas, de San Rafael, and de Tizon. Various Spanish parties visited the river, the most famous one in Utah being the Dominguez-Escalante expedition in 1776. As the two padres returned to Santa Fe, New Mexico, through southwestern Utah, they came upon an old Ute trail in an area that appeared otherwise impassable. Chiseling steps and smoothing a path for livestock, the missionaries forded the river at what was called the Crossing of the Fathers, which now rests under the waters of Lake Powell.

During the 1820s and 1830s, Euro-American mountain men ventured down and trapped parts of the Colorado. Famous personalities like Jedediah Smith, James Ohio Pattie, and Ewing Young searched for beaver along its banks, while another trapper, Denis Julien, left his inscription in Cataract Canyon. Although these men explored sections of the river, it was not until 1869 and again in 1871-72, that the Colorado was fully mapped. John Wesley Powell's two expeditions, sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute and Congress respectively, charted the water's course from Green River, Wyoming, through the Grand Canyon and beyond. His ten- and eleven-man crews collected information and sailed their wooden boats down one of the most dramatic and roughest inland waterways in the United States. Many people in Utah came to cross or visit the river but, with the exception of Moab where the water was calmer and the flood plain wide, few came to stay. For instance, the Mormons built the Hole-in-the-Rock trail in 1880, but once across, they moved on to the quieter San Juan. Charles Hall, a year later, placed into service a thirty-foot ferry boat to handle the traffic on the route between Bluff and Escalante; insufficient business caused Hall's Crossing to close three years later. Even Hite City (1883), named after Cass Hite, a prominent prospector, was a boom-and-bust mining town on the Colorado that lasted only seven years. After the placer gold was removed from the gravel bars located at sites like Dandy's Crossing and Ticaboo, the miners left their claims in search of better paydirt. Few were truly successful. Men with gold in their dreams again ventured forth in the 1890s. For about ten years, individual miners and companies with dredges tried to force riches out of the San Juan and Colorado rivers, but achieved little wealth. They, like the others, left. The 1930s and 1940s saw the introduction of a more profitable trade on the Colorado--river running and tourism. Norman Nevills, for example, headquartered at Mexican Hat and turned the red waters of the San Juan and Colorado into green cash as recreation became increasingly important. Even with the introduction of the Glen Canyon Dam in the 1950s and Lake Powell in the 1960s, there was still plenty of white water and red rock for adventurous souls to find the isolation and excitement they desired. And later, when its tributaries were heavily committed to irrigation and culinary use, the Colorado remained a playground for kayakers, rafters, and tourists. Today, the Utah portion of the Colorado River continues to offer not only its water as a resource, but also its beauty and adventure to those who come to its banks.














The Green River was known to the Shoshone Indians as the Seeds-kee-dee-Agie, or Prairie Hen River. This name, in one version or another, was later adopted and widely used by the mountain men. Dominguez and Escalante named the Green the Rio de San Buenaventura, but the river was known by later Spaniard and Mexican explorers as the Rio Verde, or Green River. This connection with the Spanish led to the Green being known for a time as the Spanish River, but by the time Ashley floated the Green in 1825, the name "Green River" was in common use. Accounts vary as to why the river is called the Green. One has it that it is because of the color of the water; another that it is named for a member of Ashley's original party of mountain men. John C. Frémont thought that the name came from the vegetation along the banks. No one account is authoritative. The Green River is Utah's major stream. Its beginnings are in Wyoming, on the eastern slopes of the Wind River Mountains, and it makes a forty-mile loop through northwestern Colorado, but the majority of the course of the Green lies in Utah. The river is 730 miles long; approximately 450 miles of it are in Utah. The Green drains the entire northeast corner of Utah, or about one-quarter of the entire area of the state. The landforms drained by the Green in Utah range from the highest part of the state, in the Uinta Mountains, to some of the lowest, in the Uinta Basin. In its course through Utah, the Green drops from an elevation of approximately 6,000 feet above sea level at Flaming Gorge Reservoir to about 3,000 feet at its confluence with the Colorado. Shortly after entering Utah, the Green enters Flaming Gorge, the first of a long series of canyons. Flaming Gorge, Horseshoe, and Kingfisher canyons are short but scenic. Red Canyon, the next in the series, is about thirty miles long, and is now the site of Flaming Gorge Dam. After Red Canyon, the Green enters Browns Park, a large east-west trending basin, and flows through it for fifteen miles before crossing the Colorado border. The river flows through the northwest corner of Colorado for forty miles, through the Canyon of Lodore, and receives the waters of its largest tributary, the Yampa, while in Colorado. The Green re-enters Utah in the middle of Whirlpool Canyon, about five miles below its confluence with the Yampa. After passing through Island and Rainbow parks, the Green runs a short but turbulent seven miles through Split Mountain Canyon, which has the greatest fall of any of the canyons of the Green--almost twenty-one feet per mile--and consequently has some of the most difficult rapids on the entire river. Below the mouth of Split Mountain Canyon, the Green flows through the open, arid landscape of the Uinta Basin for more than 100 miles, unconfined by canyons and undisturbed by rapids. In the Uinta Basin two more large tributaries, the Duchesne River from the west and the White River from the east, join the Green, their mouths almost across from each other. The next canyons are Desolation Canyon and Gray Canyon, two back-to-back canyons that total 120 miles in length. Desolation is the deepest and longest of the canyons of the Green, while Gray (earlier known as Coal Canyon) is lower but narrower. The Green leaves Gray Canyon just above the town of Green River, Utah, and flows through an open area for about thirty miles before entering the last of the canyons it traverses, Labyrinth and Stillwater canyons. As the names suggest, these are quietwater canyons, where the river loops in sinuous curves around towering cliffs of sandstone. The Green meets its sister stream, the Colorado, at the end of Stillwater Canyon, in the middle of what is now Canyonlands National Park. The Green traverses several different vegetation and fauna zones during its course through Utah, ranging from high mountains in the north to slickrock deserts in the south. Pines, firs, and groves of aspen are common in the higher parts, while pinyon and juniper are predominant below the mountains. In the lower elevations, shadscale, sagebrush, cactus, and desert shrubs are most common. Cottonwoods, tamarisk, and willows are the predominant members of the riparian plant community throughout the river's length. Likewise, fauna follow typical life zones. Elk, deer, bighorn sheep, coyotes, rabbits, squirrels, and other small rodents, and an occasional bobcat or cougar are found along the Green. Snakes, lizards, toads, and other reptiles are common near the river, less common away from it. Bird life, especially along the river corridor, is abundant, as the river is part of the main north-south flyway for some waterfowl.

The flow of the Green varies from season to season and from year to year, based on the amount of snow that accumulates in the upper parts of the drainage basin. Since the basin is largely arid, only a small portion of the total precipitation reaches the mouth of the river. The Green has only one large dam in its entire length, and so is still largely a wild river. In other words, the flow of the river can be drastically affected by sudden changes in temperature, or by rainstorms over the drainage of its tributaries. In the spring, when the snowpack is melting, the Green can flood, while during the later summer months it has been known to all but dry up. Evidence of ancient inhabitants abounds in the Green River Basin. The basin was home to the Fremont Culture, which flourished in the tributary canyons and in sheltered areas from about A.D. 600 to around A.D. 1200. The Fremont were a semi-nomadic people, who made distinctive pottery and figurines, used atlatals, and lived in pithouses. They are best known for their rock art, found on canyon walls and in sheltered overhangs throughout the river basin. The lower stretches of the Green formed the northern boundary of the Anasazi culture area, and therefore evidence of their occupation of the Green River area is limited. In later years, Shoshone and Ute peoples, both nomadic hunters, occupied the basin of the Green, the Shoshone to the north of the Uinta Mountains and the Utes to the south. The Utes still live near the river; their reservation is in the Uinta Basin. Just as the Green is Utah's major stream, so it was featured in the earliest written account of Utah's landscape. In September 1776 Friars Dominguez and Escalante and their companions crossed the Green on their way to the Utah Valley. Escalante left a written account, and the expedition's map-maker, Don Diego Miera y Pacheco, drew a map which showed an erroneous course for the river. Other Spaniards and, later, Mexicans, also were familiar with the Green; the old Spanish Trail from New Mexico to California crossed the Green just above the present-day town of Green River, Utah. These later explorers, who were probably traders, prospectors, and slavers, left no written records mentioning the river. Although trapping parties from the Hudson's Bay Company were in the upper basin of the Green as early as 1819, it wasn't until 1825 that American trappers explored the river in Utah. In April of that year, William Ashley and a party of trappers floated down the river from north of the Uinta Mountains to the mouth of the White River. This marked the first recorded time that anyone had actually floated on the river. In the next decade, Browns Park and the bottoms around the mouth of the White became favorite wintering grounds and places of rendezvous for the trappers, as they also had been for the Indians before them. Several trading posts were established in the basin of the Green, at the mouth of the White, near Whiterocks, Utah, and in Browns Park by Antoine Robidoux, Denis Julien, and others. Julien was also one of the few trappers to actually float the river after Ashley's pioneering voyage. Most refused that means of transportation as John C. Frémont, who explored the area around the upper Green in 1843, noted: "Though offering many temptations, and often discussed, no trappers have been found bold enough to undertake a voyage with so certain a prospect of a fatal termination." The California gold rush of 1849 was the motivation for the next party to explore the Green River. William Manly and several companions entered the Green near the Sweetwater crossing, and floated in an abandoned ferryboat and later dugout canoes all the way to the Uinta Basin. Above the mouth of the White River, Manly met Wakara, chief of the Utes, who convinced the '49ers that the Green was not the easiest route to California, as they had thought. Manly and his party left the river and journeyed overland to Salt Lake City. The Mormons, who settled Salt Lake in 1847, sent exploring parties into the Uinta Basin as early as the 1850s, but the surveyors returned with unfavorable reports, and the basin of the Green remained unsettled by the Latter-day Saints for another twenty years. In the meantime, the Green River basin was acquired by the United States from Mexico through the Treaty of Guadelupe-Hidalgo in 1848.

It was not until 1869 that the Green was surveyed and mapped by a scientific party. John Wesley Powell embarked on the first of two voyages down the Green in May 1869 and floated the river all the way to its confluence with the Colorado and beyond. Powell left a detailed account of the river and the surrounding landscape and prepared the first thorough maps of the river basin. Powell left his mark on the in other ways as well. He and his men named most of the canyons, geographic features, and rapids along the Green River during his two voyages in 1869 and 1871. Powell also paved the way for later generations of explorers and scientists interested in the unique geology of the basin of the Green River. Less than ten years after Major Powell's pioneering voyage, the first permanent settlement in the Utah's Green River drainage was founded. Vernal was settled by a party of Mormons led by Jeremiah Hatch in 1878. Despite a hard winter, when a number of the settlers died during a diphtheria epidemic, and an Indian scare caused by the Meeker Massacre in Colorado, Vernal survived and is today the largest town in the Green River Basin. Jensen, a town sited on the river twelve miles east of Vernal, was founded at the same time. A few years later, near the old Spanish Crossing (also known as Gunnison's Crossing), the town of Blake was founded by construction crews of the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railway. In the late nineteenth century, the town of Green River, Utah, was founded across the river from Blake; the two towns have since grown together and are known by the name Green River. The vast majority of the land found in the Green River basin is controlled by the federal government; private lands are largely limited to bottoms along the river itself, used for agriculture, and to townsites. In addition, the Uintah-Ouray Ute Indian Reservation is located on either side of the river from below Jensen to just above Green River, Utah. There have been no gold or silver rushes into the Green River basin in Utah; until World War II, the major source of income in the area was farming and ranching. Shortly after that conflict, however, a producing oil well was developed in the Ashley field, east of Vernal, and oil and gas production have since become a major source of income for the residents of the Green River basin. The other major source of mineral wealth found in the Green River basin is coal, which is mined extensively in the drainage of the Price River, a minor tributary of the Green. As with any mineral-extraction-based economy, this has resulted in a boom-and-bust cycle that affects residents of the Green River basin to this day. Tourism also has become a major factor in the economies of many towns in the basin. Places such as Dinosaur National Monument and the Cleveland Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry (administered by the Bureau of Land Management), as well as Flaming Gorge and other reservoirs, and of course the river itself, draw thousands of tourists from all over the world. The river basin is crossed by several major transcontinental highways and railroads, chief among them being U.S. highways 40 and 6/50, and the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railway. Although there have been attempts, most notably around the turn of the century, to develop passenger and freight service on the Green River, the seasonal flows and rapid-filled stretches of the river have precluded any such development. As early as 1904 the U.S. Reclamation Service and the state government began investigating the possibility of building dams on the Green for water reclamation and power production. A comprehensive survey of the Green River for dam sites was undertaken by the U.S. Geological Survey and Utah Power and Light Company in the years 1914 to 1922. Shortly after World War II, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced plans to build a large dam on the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument, just inside the Colorado border. Another was planned for Split Mountain Canyon, a few miles downstream. Widely praised in Utah, this plan soon met fierce opposition from conservationists, resulting in a bitter, protracted, and ultimately successful fight to defeat the Echo Park Dam. The controversy left divisions in the communities of the Green River Basin that linger to this day. In 1956 work began on a dam in Red Canyon, on the Upper Green. Flaming Gorge Dam was completed in 1963, and today the reservoir has become a popular destination for fishermen and boaters. The Green River is the largest of all of Utah's streams and is central to the history of the state in terms of its exploration and development. Therefore, the Green fully deserves to be called Utah's master stream.








The Jordan River is the northward-flowing, forty-mile-long waterway connecting Utah Lake on the south with the Great Salt Lake. Returning from California in June 1827, Jedediah Smith crossed the Jordan with some difficulty, noting in his journal that he was "very much strangled" in his attempt. This was probably a reference to the annual spring flooding of what normally is a rather slow-moving river; an occurrence which has been a matter of periodic concern to the area's inhabitants since the founding of Salt Lake City and surrounding communities. The river was named the "Western Jordan" in 1847 by Heber C. Kimball, soon after his arrival in Utah. He noted its resemblance to the Middle Eastern river of the same name: a river flowing from a "fresh water lake through fertile valleys to a dead sea." "Western" was soon dropped from the river's name. During construction of the Salt Lake Temple, granite blocks were floated down the river to the city. The Jordan was again used to float construction materials in 1869, this time floating logs and ties for use on the Central Utah Railroad. Almost from the beginning of settlement, the communities of Utah and Salt Lake valleys have used the Jordan to carry waste and sewage away to the Great Salt Lake. This created an understandable, albeit occasional, concern for the sanitary and aesthetic qualities of the river. After the river overflowed its banks in 1952, Salt Lake County built a diversion dam and the Army Corps of Engineers enlarged an already extant surplus canal. There followed a program of dredging and straightening the river channel to reduce the damage caused by periodic spring floods. Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s the Jordan continued to be used as a waste disposal canal for area slaughterhouses, packing plants, mineral reduction mills, and laundries. In 1973 the Utah State Legislature created the Provo-Jordan River Parkway Authority to establish programs to enhance the natural quality of the river and to develop park and recreational facilities, water conservation projects, and flood control measures. By 1976 the Salt Lake Tribune was noting improvements in water quality and decreased industrial pollution, although some areas of the river still needed to be improved. Since the 1980s the Jordan River and its environs have come to be thought of as an urban oasis, offering a variety of recreational activities such as the International Peace Gardens, jogging and equestrian trails, fishing, canoeing, a water slide, a model airplane park, golf courses, and other attractions.






The Provo River is one of the premier Utah rivers and spans over 80 miles from the head waters of the Uinta wilderness to Utah Lake. Ute Indians called the river Timpanoquint, meaning "water running over rocks." Early settlers changed the name to Provo River. The two main branches of Provo River are the North Fork Provo River and the South Fork Provo River. The river is impounded by Jordanelle Reservoir at the north end of the Heber Valley. Deer Creek Dam further impounds the Provo River with Deer Creek Reservoir. The two branches of Provo are split into upper, middle, and lower sections. The upper Provo originates in the high Uintas and flows into Jordanelle Reservoir. Below the dam of Jordanelle to Deer Creek Reservoir is known as the Middle Provo River. The Middle Provo is joined on the right by Snake Creek. The lower section of the Provo River flows out of Deer Creek Reservoir through Provo Canyon and into Utah Lake.







The San Juan River, named by the Spanish San Juan Bautista (Saint John the Baptist), threads its way through Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah to the border of northern Arizona. With its headwaters in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado from which comes ninety percent of its flow, the river still drains nearly sixteen million acres of the Four Corners region as it drops from an altitude of 14,000 feet to approximately 3,600 feet above sea level. The flow of the river today is largely controlled by the waters released from Navajo Dam in New Mexico into the San Juan. The river's Utah portion is approximately 125 miles long; it then terminates as it flows into Lake Powell. The river historically has played an important part as a continuous source of water in an arid climate. Anasazi ruins and rock-art panels dot its sandstone cliffs and floodplains. The San Juan also plays a significant role in Navajo mythology, where it is known as Old Age River, One-With-a-Long-Body, or One-With-a-Wide-Body, and is characterized variously as an old man with hair of white foam, a snake coiled at the Goosenecks, a flash of lightning, and a black club of protection. This latter theme is important to the Navajos, who, even before the river became an official reservation boundary in 1884, viewed it as a line of separation between their safe confines and the land of the Utes and white men. The first substantial Anglo settlement on the Utah portion of the San Juan occurred at Riverside (Aneth) in 1878-79 when eighteen families from Colorado established a small community more than a year before the Mormons made their trek through the Hole-in-the-Rock and settled Bluff. Through the 1880s and early 1890s, trading posts flourished as Navajos herded sheep and planted small horticultural plots while the settlers struggled to prevent destructive flooding. In addition to agriculture, the San Juan has been the focus of a variety of economic endeavors. During the 1890s and early 1900s, there were futile attempts to find gold and the beginning of an interest in oil. Oil companies in the 1920s started drilling in earnest, giving rise to a petroleum industry that is still in operation today near the river towns of Aneth, Montezuma Creek, Bluff, and Mexican Hat. By the 1940s Norman Nevills and Jack Frost dominated the river-running business and took hundreds of tourists down the San Juan. This industry continues to grow, and the Bureau of Land Management has had to restrict in an attempt to keep the river experience safe and enjoyable for all.






The Sevier River drains a 5,500-square-mile portion of the mountainous desert transition zone between the eastern border of the Great Basin and the Colorado Plateau. The Sevier flows about 240 miles north from Garfield County through desert lands before it bends west and then south to empty into the mostly dry bed of Sevier Lake in West Millard County at the end of its 325-mile length. During historic times, the Native Americans known as Paiutes and Goshutes have occupied the drainage. When the Dominguez-Escalante party came through the area in 1776, they reported the natives to be more Spanish than Indian because of their beards. The explorers' cartographer, Don Bernardo de Miera, named Sevier Lake after himself and called the river Rio Buenaventura, the "river of the good journey." The Sevier takes its name from an appellation by the Spanish trappers Moricio Arce and Lagos Garcia, who came from Taos in 1813 to trade with the Utes around Utah Lake. Escaping south after troubles with the Utes, they said they traveled to the "Rio Sebero" (also reported as Severo or Seviro--Spanish for "severe" or "violent"). Trapping was popular in the region until about 1830. The river is on the California leg of the old Spanish Trail, a trade route which joined Santa Fe to the west coast; it arched north into the Great Basin to avoid the impassable barrier of the lower Colorado River. Settlement of Utah territory by whites began in 1847 and led to colonies in the region both north and south. In 1850 Mormon settlers were sent by Brigham Young to the Sevier River Valley. Native Americans in the area felt threatened when settlement encroached, and an altercation between settlers and Indians in 1852 left four Indians dead in Salina. At the same time, coming west through Salina Canyon on a railroad route survey was a government party led by John W. Gunnison. The surveyors were caught in an early morning ambush by vengeful Indians, who killed Gunnison and six of his crew. Irrigation near the mouth of the river started with settlement in 1859 in west Millard County. Obtaining water for irrigation was the most significant challenge for settlers in the semi-arid land. Uncontrolled flooding caused downstream irrigators to abandon many dams before they were finally permanently established in 1912. After floods, upriver diversions were the next most vexing challenge. The Higgins Decree of 1900 divided the waters of the lower Sevier at Vermillion Dam and established a commission to adjudicate user rights. Other decisions followed until 1936, at which time the Cox Decree finally allotted all the water of the Sevier River. It is one of the most used rivers in the United States. Less than 1 percent, or 44,840 acre-feet, of the total precipitation is not consumed. Consumption is about 1,100,000 acre-feet annually.






The oldest and most visited national park, Zion National Park is located in southwestern Utah. Zion Canyon is located on the southern part of the Markagunt Plateau. It is cut by tributaries of the Virgin River which have left eroded canyon walls and monoliths that are beautiful and overpowering. Zion Canyon presents a diverse collection of nature's wonders that include such features as the towering and magnificent 2,200-foot Great White Throne, the park's most famous landmark; the Court of the Patriarchs; the Sentinel; the Watchman; Checkerboard Mesa; Kolob Arch, at 310 feet the world's largest known natural span; and the Narrows of the Virgin River, where a person can walk upstream to places so narrow that both sides of the canyon walls can almost be touched with one's outstretched hands.









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