Firehole Swimming Beach

Forest Road 106 leaves U.S. 191 and runs west about ten miles toward the water. At the Firehole complex entrance the road turns north, bears left for three-tenths of a mile, then takes the left fork for eight-tenths more to the swim site. The beach is a designated day-use stretch of shore on Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Sweetwater County, Wyoming. The Ashley National Forest runs it as part of Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area. A vault restroom stands open year-round. There is no drinking water and there are no picnic tables, and a vehicle pays $5 for the day.

Sand below the Firehole bluffs

The shore is high desert. Russian olive and sagebrush grow in scattered stands through the neighboring campground, and shade is scarce. Across the water the reservoir is ringed by bluffs and red rock formations. The Forest Service describes days under clear, unobstructed sun and temperatures that drop quickly after sundown. It also describes wind that runs from gentle to strong and persistent and sometimes lifts the dust.

A boat ramp lies next to the beach. Fishing, boating, canoeing and water skiing go on alongside the swimming. Firehole Canyon Campground, on the far northeastern shore of the reservoir, is open May through September and is 29 miles from Rock Springs. It has showers, drinking water, and wood tables under shared shade pavilions. The reservoir holds Colorado River cutthroat, brown, rainbow and lake trout, along with kokanee salmon, smallmouth bass, burbot and common carp. A Bureau of Reclamation photograph records a 51.8-pound lake trout taken from Flaming Gorge Reservoir in 1988.

The floor of Lake Gosiute

Chimney rock formations stand at Firehole Canyon. Below them, according to a 2020 SweetwaterNOW account of a county tour, lie sediments laid down by Lake Gosiute. That lake covered the Green River Basin more than 60 million years ago and then disappeared. The canyon also offers camping, mountain biking, hiking and a shooting range.

An interpretive marker at the Linwood Bay overlook, near Manila, uses Firehole as its example of the Wyoming rock: “The rocks generally lie flat and are light colored and soft.” Its companion caption, for Sheep Creek in Utah, says the rocks there “are more colorful and have been bent and forced upward by tremendous earth pressure.” The Bureau of Reclamation divides the reservoir’s country the same way. The Utah end has mountains, benches, canyons and forest. The Wyoming end has low hills, shale badlands and desert shrubs. Deer, elk, bighorn sheep, pronghorn, prairie dogs and eagles all live in the reservoir area. The Forest Service mentions wild mustangs, deer and antelope along the drives near Firehole.

Trappers, and a gorge that looked on fire

According to WyoHistory.org, the first inhabitants were most likely people of the Fremont culture, displaced around A.D. 1000 by the Shoshone and Ute. In the 1820s William Ashley and his party explored the Green River by boat and trapped beaver there for several seasons. The Linwood Bay marker credits Ashley with originating the rendezvous system on Henry’s Fork. Early in July 1825, it says, 120 trappers and mountain men met about 15 miles up the fork to trade furs and supplies.

On May 24, 1869, John Wesley Powell and nine men set out from Green River, Wyoming, in small wooden boats. Three days later, by the Bureau of Reclamation’s account, they reached the Uinta Mountains. There they saw the sun reflecting off a red gorge that looked from a distance as if it were on fire. Powell described it as “a flaring, brilliant, red gorge that may be seen from the north a score of miles away,” and named it Flaming Gorge. The canyon lies just upstream of where the dam would later stand.

Concrete, tea, and a buffalo barbecue

The dam grew out of the 1922 Colorado River Basin Compact, which allotted 7.5 million acre-feet of water a year to each of two basins. As the lower states used more water, the upper states of Utah, Colorado and Wyoming came to doubt they could count on their share without dams to store it. Engineers and geologists studied the Flaming Gorge site in the 1940s. On April 11, 1956, Congress passed the Colorado River Storage Project Act.

Green River celebrated “Flaming Gorge Days” in 1957 and 1958. Residents dressed in old-time clothes, and the men grew beards, “the hirsute male custom of range and mining days,” in the words of the Sweetwater County paper Wyoming Trails. That paper’s February 1957 issue advertised a last chance for guided trips “to visit all of the area which will form Flaming Gorge Lake within the next few years.”

The prime contract went out on June 18, 1958. That same year the Secretary of the Interior founded Dutch John, Utah, to house the workers. The Bureau of Reclamation’s history says construction temporarily tripled the population of Utah’s Daggett County. The Green River was diverted around the site on August 17, 1959. The first bucket of concrete went in on September 18, 1960, and the last on November 15, 1962.

Upstream lay Linwood. George Solomon laid it out in 1900 and planted the rows of cottonwoods that gave it its name. The Utah-Wyoming line on the 41st parallel ran through the middle of town. Its school, built in the fall of 1904, was governed by two state school boards, Wyoming for the north half and Utah for the south. The Bureau hired a local man, Alonzo Jarvie, to work with his former neighbors whose land would be flooded. Houses had to be moved or destroyed, and owners were compensated and offered help to relocate. According to one story from the time, Minnie Rasmussen was the last rancher to leave Linwood. She invited Jarvie and the contractors to tea and said she would consider their offers. That night she burned down her own house.

Water began filling the reservoir on December 10, 1962, behind a thin-arch concrete dam that stands 502 feet above bedrock in Utah. President John F. Kennedy started the first generator on September 27, 1963. On August 17, 1964, Lady Bird Johnson dedicated the project, the dam in the Bureau’s record and the new reservoir in WyoHistory’s account of her stop at Green River. “This will be the first time,” the Green River Star declared, “that Green River and Sweetwater County have ever been exposed to such national publicity.” The Star urged businesses to fly the flag and close for two hours. The mayor hoped citizens would turn out “dressed in western attire if possible.” After her speech the first lady sampled a buffalo barbecue. After Labor Day the headline read “26,000 Visitors in Flaming Gorge Area on Weekend,” at a time when fewer than 4,000 people lived in Green River.

The reservoir now reaches as far as 91 miles north of the dam. On October 1, 1968, Congress created Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area: 207,363 acres of land and water, almost equally divided between Utah and Wyoming.