Skip to main content

2016 Summer Mountain Trip Part 17; US Route 191 over Flaming Gorge Dam

By
The morning following visiting Yellowstone National Park and Grand Teton National Park I left Jackson headed south on US 26/89/189/191.  At Hoback Junction I made a turn away from the Snake River and followed US 189/191 southward towards I-80, my next destination was in northeast Utah.


This blog serves as Part 17 of the Summer Mountain Trip Series, Part 16 can be found here:

2016 Summer Mountain Trip Part 16; Grand Teton National Park and the nebulous gap in the US Routes

In Daniel US 189 splits away from US 191 towards the Salt Lake City area.  I followed US 191 southward through Sweetwater County to approach I-80.  While in Sweetwater County I stopped in Eden just south of the junction with WY 28.  Eden apparently boasts a population of about 300 spread out over about 13 miles but the core of the community essentially was a husk of mid-20th century vehicles and buildings.







US 191 meets I-80 in Rock Springs and multiplexes it westward.  I followed the short multiplex of I-80 and continued towards the Utah State Line on US 191.  US 191 ascends high above the terrain which offers several vistas of the the Flaming Gorge Reservoir on the Green River.


The Flaming Gorge Reservoir impounds a 91 mile stretch of the Green River in Sweetwater County Wyoming and Daggett County Utah.  Flaming Gorge was discovered in 1869 and was named after the red sandstone that lines the canyon face.  Flaming Gorge has been the source of a reservoir since Flaming Gorge Dam was completed in Dagget County Utah in 1964.  Flaming Gorge Dam is a 502 foot tall arch concrete dam which is the center piece of the Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area.  US 191 crosses over the Green River via the Flaming Gorge Dam which can be seen from a vista above the reservoir.



The first highway over Flaming Gorge Dam was Utah State Route 260 which was legislatively approved in 1957.  Initially UT 260 did go to the Wyoming State Line over the former route of UT 220 but the road was cut back to the Antelope Flat Campground when the waters of the Flaming Gorge Reservoir began to rise.  By 1981 a new route extending the highway to the Wyoming State Line and I-80 in Wyoming was built.  By 1982 this became part of an extension of US Route 191 which moved the south terminus from Idaho Falls, ID to Chambers, AZ.  On the 1950 Utah State Highway Map below the route of UT 220 out of Linwood (now flooded over by the Flaming Gorge Reservoir) can be seen jutting east from UT 43.  The USends stub below details the history of endpoints on US Route 191.

1950 Utah State Highway Map

USends on US Route 191 endpoints

From Flaming Gorge Dam I followed US 191 south to US 40 in Vernal.  I turned east on US 40 towards Colorado and Dinosaur National Monument.

Part 18 of the 2016 Summer Mountain Trip can be found below:

2016 Summer Mountain Trip Part 18; Harper's Corner Drive to Dinosaur National Monument
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Paper Highways: The Unbuilt New Orleans Bypass (Proposed I-410)

By
  There are many examples around the United States of proposed freeway corridors in urban areas that never saw the light of day for one reason or another. They all fall somewhere in between the little-known and the infamous and from the mundane to the spectacular. One of the more obscure and interesting examples of such a project is the short-lived idea to construct a southern beltway for the New Orleans metropolitan area in the 1960s and 70s. Greater New Orleans and its surrounding area grew rapidly in the years after World War II, as suburban sprawl encroached on the historically rural downriver parishes around the city. In response to the development of the region’s Westbank and the emergence of communities in St. Charles and St. John the Baptist Parishes as viable suburban communities during this period, regional planners began to consider concepts for new infrastructure projects to serve this growing population.  The idea for a circular freeway around the southern perimeter of t
Post a Comment
Read more

Hernando de Soto Bridge (Memphis, TN)

By
The newest of the bridges that span the lower Mississippi River at Memphis, the Hernando de Soto Bridge was completed in 1973 and carries Interstate 40 between downtown Memphis and West Memphis, AR. The bridge’s signature M-shaped superstructure makes it an instantly recognizable landmark in the city and one of the most visually unique bridges on the Mississippi River. As early as 1953, Memphis city planners recommended the construction of a second highway bridge across the Mississippi River to connect the city with West Memphis, AR. The Memphis & Arkansas Bridge had been completed only four years earlier a couple miles downriver from downtown, however it was expected that long-term growth in the metro area would warrant the construction of an additional bridge, the fourth crossing of the Mississippi River to be built at Memphis, in the not-too-distant future. Unlike the previous three Mississippi River bridges to be built the city, the location chosen for this bridge was about two
1 comment
Read more

Memphis & Arkansas Bridge (Memphis, TN)

By
  Like the expansion of the railroads the previous century, the modernization of the country’s highway infrastructure in the early and mid 20th Century required the construction of new landmark bridges along the lower Mississippi River (and nation-wide for that matter) that would facilitate the expected growth in overall traffic demand in ensuing decades. While this new movement had been anticipated to some extent in the Memphis area with the design of the Harahan Bridge, neither it nor its neighbor the older Frisco Bridge were capable of accommodating the sharp rise in the popularity and demand of the automobile as a mode of cross-river transportation during the Great Depression. As was the case 30 years prior, the solution in the 1940s was to construct a new bridge in the same general location as its predecessors, only this time the bridge would be the first built exclusively for vehicle traffic. This bridge, the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge, was completed in 1949 and was the third
Post a Comment
Read more