Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes
- The small town of Green River, Utah, is renowned for its Melon Days festival and natural beauty.
- The town's livelihood is linked to the Green River, which is crucial to the Colorado River system, supplying water to seven states and 30 tribes.
- Recent water management efforts, including significant releases from reservoirs like Flaming Gorge, aim to sustain the river's flow and support hydropower, addressing ongoing concerns about the system's declining water generation capabilities.
Editor's note: This is one of two articles about the Green River, the Utah town called Green River and melon farming. Read the other article here.
This article is published through the Colorado River Collaborative, a solutions journalism initiative supported by the Janet Quinney Lawson Institute for Land, Water, and Air at Utah State University. See all of our stories about how Utahns are impacted by the Colorado River at greatsaltlakenews.org/coloradoriver.
GREEN RIVER — Sonya Nelson Spackman stood in line on a mild Saturday afternoon, waiting patiently to purchase a bag of kettle corn as she proudly displayed her latest acquisition — a woven purse crafted to look like a juicy piece of watermelon, a bargain she said she got for just $35.
Spackman lives five hours away from the town of Green River, but the 326-mile trek from Park Valley, Box Elder County, is something she worries little about.
Green River, she says, is in her heart. Her roots.
"I grew up here. This is home," she explained. "I try to come down every year."
Melon Days, held since 1906 during the third weekend of September, is where strangers make new friends and old friends who are natives of Green River reconnect through their shared heritage and culture of growing up in a small town where high school graduating classes numbered a dozen or less and at a young age you discovered the value of dirt, mud puddles, farm animals and of course — the melons.
"I can't get enough of the good ones, so I sure miss those that are grown here," Spackman said. "I love them."
Opportunity from a river that connects us
The town of Green River, Emery County, — population of about 800 people — is more than just a place along the I-70 corridor that boasts famous watermelons and some of the most scenic nearby landscapes in Utah — including the San Rafael Swell, Goblin Valley State Park, the Little Wild Horse and Bell Canyon trails. There is the Green River itself, with rafting, kayaking and its namesake — the lush Green River State Park that is packed with mature trees, plenty of shade, a golf course and spectacular views of the river itself.
If you are a lucky youngster, you might even snare a catfish from the river like Lily Sparrow, 12, did while on a field trip from Promontory Charter School in Perry, Box Elder County. She and a couple dozen other students were part of an outing that focused on the environment and the effects of erosion.
Sparrow proudly held up the results of her hard work of casting her fishing rod and being as patient as possible to snare the yellow fish she dubbed Greg No. 2, named in sequence after Greg No. 1, caught the day before.
The Green River is 730 miles long and is the main tributary of the Colorado River. The Colorado River was once dubbed the country's most endangered river by American Rivers because of its many depletions, the dams it supports in the arid West and a more than two-decades-long drought that has left a hydrological imprint that will be hard to overcome.
Seven basin states, two countries and 30 tribes depend on the Colorado River. And for the Colorado River to be healthy, the Green River has to do its part.
The Green's headwaters are in Wyoming's Wind River Range and — like someone presented with too many choices on a menu — the river seems unable to make up its mind about where to go first.
From Wyoming, it drops down into Utah where much of its water is captured in Flaming Gorge, famous for its trophy trout.
According to Utah.com, the Flaming Gorge Dam rises 502 feet above bedrock, capturing enough Green River water to form a reservoir that extends as far as 91 miles to the north. It has a total capacity of nearly 3.8 million acre-feet and a surface area of 42,020 acres.
The Green River then makes a detour to the east into Colorado before eventually returning to Utah to carve out dramatic canyons with amazing opportunities for rafting, including Desolation Canyon.
The Green River is Utah's main waterway and by the time it meets up with the Colorado River at Canyonlands National Park, it has traveled more than 450 miles through the state. In 2023, 4.52 million acre-feet of water was measured at a gauge along the river. A previous year, it sat at 1.6 million acre-feet, according to Mike Drake, deputy state engineer with the Utah Division of Water Rights.
"It definitely varies," he said. "As an interstate river, it functions very differently. There is always a lot of water running in the Green River."
That said, the strain on the Colorado River is leading to new operational decisions that affect the system.
"We know the Colorado River, just the whole system, is not generating the water it has in the past and so there's definitely a cause for concern, and the need to manage the river more effectively," he said.
To help prop up the Colorado River, there was an orchestrated combined release over a two-year period of time of 660,000 acre-feet of water from Blue Mesa and Flaming Gorge into the Green River to help the Colorado River system and to ultimately keep hydropower on at the Glen Canyon Dam at Lake Powell.
Gene Shawcroft, Upper Colorado River Commissioner, said both reservoirs have since recovered from those releases due to good water years.
Read the full article at Deseret.com.
