Hidden valley, Brown's Park northeast of Vernal has much to offer

BROWN'S PARK, Daggett County — If getting "far from the madding crowd" has its appeal, you couldn't get more pleasantly removed from the urban hurly-burly than Brown's Park, in extreme northwestern Colorado and "east-northern" Utah — that is, northeast of Vernal.

Just below the point on the map where the two states' border bumps into Wyoming, you'll find scattered ranches, from rustic ruins to contemporary cattle operations, dotting a hidden valley. And here the often-turbulent Green River, downstream from Flaming Gorge Dam, is meandering and pastoral.

Brown's Park is simply, for the most part, not on today's beaten track.

Originally known as "Brown's Hole," and said to be named for a French-Canadian trapper and early settler, Baptiste Brown (though there are other candidates, historians have noted), Green and Colorado river explorer John Wesley Powell liked the word "park" a little better in his writings, and it seems to have stuck.

You have to drive to Rock Springs, Wyo., or Flaming Gorge, to link up with the Brown's Park Road from the north via U.S. 191. (A fine new wide, though unpaved, road has been built just above the valley itself.) There is a paved road on the Colorado side, state Route 318, with a junction at Maybell, in Moffatt County, Colo., an hour-plus away on U.S. 40. Or there's the old back road Uinta Basin-to-Wyoming route from Vernal 65 miles to the south, via Jones Hole.

Despite its remoteness, 40-mile-long Brown's Park has much to offer. Campers, hikers, fishermen, bird- and wildlife-watchers, cyclists, hunters, river-runners and other enthusiasts can all find something of interest to do or see.

Perhaps the most persistent reminders of the modern world in today's Brown's Park, other than the unsurfaced roads through it, are ubiquitous poles and signs marking the routes of gas pipelines now wending their way from Wyoming and Utah's Clay Basin to the north, and over the Uinta Mountain passes to the south.

This is a valley with a long history, one that has witnessed Indian encampments (it was a winter favorite), mountain man gatherings, an early trading post (the 1830s ramshackle and long-vanished Fort Davy Crockett), and pioneer trading and homesteading.

It even saw early cattle drives, Diana Allen Kouris notes in her 1988 book "The Romantic and Notorious History of Brown's Park." We're most familiar with drives from Texas north after the Civil War (think of John Wayne in "Red River" and Robert Duvall in "Lonesome Dove"), but Brown's Park grasslands lured drovers thataway during the California gold rush, moving cattle to feed the forty-niners.