Salt Wash , Green River, UT

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To get to the The Salt Wash Trail take the Ruby Ranch Road 12 miles to I-70 and then drive 13 miles to Green River, for a trip of less than an hour, but that wasn’t jeeping. Instead, a few miles after the oil well I found the left turn onto Salt Wash Trail. This trail passed through colorful hills of hardened mud and sand, winding its way up and down and around the mounds. I spotted some beautiful vistas from the tops of hills, and could pick up some speed in the flats. The appearance of the land was somewhat creepy, a cross between the Badlands of South Dakota and the tailings of a strip mine, with little vegetation of any kind. It was a fascinating three hours.

The Salt Wash Trail would have taken me to a dead end at the Green River, but I didn’t need another swim, so a couple of miles before that we turned right onto the Crystal Geyser Trail, the one I had been advised to stay away from in summer. This trail was the one I was most reluctant to explore alone, because it was discontiguous on the newest topo maps (published in the late 1980’s). While I already drove many unmarked trails on this trip, they were all spurs or shortcuts, which were of no consequence if missed. I came to an impassable section an hour up this trail, then I would have to take a five hour detour back via the Interstate.

Thankfully, the Crystal Geyser Trail was not hard to follow. There was even one stretch up a slope that was graded. The part that was discontiguous on the map was obscure, but not invisible. There was one point where I had to make a decision at an intersection, where both forks went in the desired direction, but a 5-minute drive down the left fork indicated that it was not the correct choice.

An hour or two from its start the trail intersected a well-traveled gravel road. To the right was the town of Green River ten miles away. But I first turned left on a half-mile spur next to the river to see the main item of interest on this trail, the Crystal Geyser, a “cold water geyser that erupts periodically” ..

I didn’t expect much, but I was impressed. A quarter acre of land around the geyser was completely covered with rock-hard mineral deposits in all possible shades of yellow, orange and brown, forming thousands of little terraces (“rimstone dams” in caver’s terminology) full of water just millimeters deep. Because these pools were all wet, I figured that the geyser erupted recently, and from the extent of the wet area it must have been quite high. The terraces stepped down to a mud bank at the Green River, where we acted out our instinct to hop into the water. For a photo.

Viewed edge-on from the water level, the mineral terraces formed beautiful intricate patterns. At the center of the geyser is a eight-inch diameter pipe sticking out of the ground, and looking into it you could see bubbling water. Not knowing when it was to erupt again, I felt like I risked my camera, if not my life, shooting straight down into the geyser. But at least the water was cold, not boiling.

I reasoned later that this geyser was probably originally an oil drill site, abandoned after the drill popped into a geothermal pocket of gas and water. It is now an obscure tourist spot, though a tourist would have to be fairly desperate to drive the ten miles from Green River on a dirt road. Perhaps, if you can predict its eruption, it’s the only place to go for a cold shower.

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