Yampa River

The Yampa is the last major free-flowing tributary of the Colorado River. No dam regulates it. No reservoir stores it. The snowmelt comes off the Park Range and the Flat Tops, fills the channel, and runs through Dinosaur National Monument the way every river in the West used to run before the Bureau of Reclamation rebuilt the hydrology of the continent. That fact alone makes this trip significant — but the canyon delivers on it. Seventy-two miles from Deerlodge Park to Split Mountain, crossing from the Yampa into the Green at Echo Park, through Whirlpool Canyon and the Split Mountain Gorge, with Warm Springs producing one of the most feared rapids in the Colorado system and the whole corridor carrying the weight of the Echo Park Dam fight that saved it. This is the complete Dinosaur traverse. It is the trip that the conservation movement made possible, through the canyon system they chose to protect instead of Glen Canyon.