The beautiful and remote White River runs 195 miles and holds an undeniable magic. Running through northwest Colorado, within Rio Blanco County, it joins the Green River in Utah and then flows on into the Colorado River. Providing water for the towns of Meeker and Rangely, as well as numerous ranchers, outfitting and fishing operations, and oil, gas and shale operations, it is largely a free running river. It has three reservoirs: Lake Avery, Rio Blanco, and Kenney Reservoir, just outside of Rangely.

The earliest inhabitants besides the prehistoric tribes, were the Ute Indians. The White River Utes lived and migrated with the seasons from the Flat Tops in the summer to Utah during the winter months. Their time in the valley ended with the Meeker Massacre in 1879 when Indian Agent Nathan Meeker and 10 of his employees were killed. (More information here about this turning point in White River history.)

Another early explorer of the area was John Wesley Powell. He travelled much of the area, built and lived in a cabin on the White River in what is now known as Powell Park, and left a large legacy in the area with his early Geographic Expedition.

With headwaters in the White River National Forest and Flattops Wilderness, the river’s preservation all started with an unsung hero. A young Arthur Carhart, 27 years old, fresh from the horrors of World War I battlefields, and bearing a degree in Landscape Design and City Planning, landed a job as a forest service reception engineer for the Rocky Mountain District. As leases for vacation homes were proving lucrative, in the summer of 1919, Carhart was assigned to conduct a survey of Trappers Lake and lay out a plan for roads, a marina and one hundred homes.

He worked diligently, but something about the place touched Carhart. Some say it was a conversation with a couple of big game hunters camped out on the Flat Tops, while others suggest an encounter with a Ute spirit, but most believe it was simply the rugged beauty of the spot that swayed him.

When he returned to Denver with the plans, he urged his superior, C.J. Stahl, to disregard them. Trappers Lake, Carhart asserted, was too great a recreational resource to turn over to a select wealthy few.

“It was kind of a radical call to make at the time,” observed Ken Coffin, district ranger for the Blanco Ranger District. “Back then the Forest Service was about cutting trees and building roads and summer homes.”

But it worked. Stahl took Carhart’s advice. The money set aside for the project was redirected and Trappers Lake was left pristine.

In 1901, Theodore Roosevelt lion hunted in the Danforth Hills and Price Creek west of Meeker, returning four years later to hunt bear and fish on the North Fork of the White on the Pot Hole Ranch.  Roosevelt was quoted as saying, “There can be no greater cause than that of conservation in this country.” His vision of managing public lands for current and future generations, for the greatest good, continues to shape the tremendous National Forest system we have. Today, the White River National Forest is one of the premier hunting and fishing areas in Colorado, a destination for those who live here and those who travel here.

Over the years, 14.2 million acres have been set aside as “primitive”, for which the definition reads, in part, “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain…”

In December 1975, Congress set aside 235,230 acres of Routt and White River national forests as the Flat Tops Wilderness Area. A thin strip of the White River National Forest along the road in was left out, but Trappers Lake itself lies wholly within the wilderness. Carhart died in 1978, but today the cradle of the White River lives on in wilderness.

Today, the river is in our hands.