Still Very Wet
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Union Pass Road
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Green River Lakes road
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Green River Lakes Road Still Too Wet
by Dawn Svalberg
April 25, 2004
We know a lot of people are just itching to get out and back into the mountains, and one of the favorite places is Green River Lakes. So we checked out this road on Sunday, April 25th to see how far we can get. This road is marginally passable up to about the Union Pass road junction, with dry patches intermixed with many wet, muddy, snowy stretches. This is about as far as things look good enough to go right now, and certain stretches were marginal at best.
We didn't drive beyond the cattle guard before Kendall Warm Springs because it was obvious the road was still too wet and muddy and we didn't want to make things worse on the main road. The roadbed is very soft and will damage very easily right now if people try to push through on the road. There are already ugly ruts in places where people have gone through the wet and muddy sections instead of turning back.
The road into Whiskey Grove Campground is dry for the first stretch, but runs into a big snowbank where it turns to go into the campground. You can park where it is dry and walk down to the Green River if you want to fish that spot, but you can't get into the campground yet. The Union Pass road is still impassable with large snowdrifts in the road from the start. You can get through one snowbank to just across the Green River bridge and a nice river access point which appears dry.
Looks to us like some folks have tried to push up the main road past the Union Pass road junction, but the road is really too wet to do this and they are making things worse by creating big ruts in the road trying to continue. The dry sections of road are very washboarded. The Forest Service usually grades the road once it dries out enough, but right now it will just about rattle your fillings out if you don't have good shocks. RV-ers, don't try this road yet. The roadbed isn't firm enough and the road edges are extremely soft and easy to get stuck in doing an Austin Powers turnaround process to get out where the road gets bad.
Fishermen, there are lots of river stretches accessible from the forest boundary up to the Union Pass junction. The river doesn't look high at all. Sure hope this doesn't mean we've already had spring melt... Ladies, the restroom at the Forest Serice boundary parking lot is open. Basically, this road needs another couple of weeks to dry out and firm up and we recommend folks go to either New Fork Lakes right now (which is BEAUTIFUL-see related story from today) or the middle Fremont Lake campground.
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