Fifty years ago, the town of Green River had only two swimming pools, both located in motels. When summer temperatures soared, local kids could pay 25 cents to swim for two hours at the Robbers Roost Motel. A more exciting alternative was to go down to the new state park located on the banks of the town’s namesake river. There, safely clad in life jackets, kids could swing like Tarzan from a rope tied to a shoreline cottonwood and drop into the cool river current.

The town of Green River began as a ferry crossing point in the late-1870s. The Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad soon arrived, and the community boomed. By the mid-20th century, gas stations, restaurants and motels lined U.S. highways 6 and 50, which ran down Main Street. Now skirted by Interstate 70, this 875-person community serves west-bound motorists as the last gas stop for 107 miles – reportedly the longest stretch of interstate highway with no services.


Green River State Park opened in 1965 as a recreational retreat featuring a shady campground with river access. For years, the park’s boat ramp served as the launch point for the annual Canyon Country River Marathon. The bygone event featured a 184-mile motorboat race through Canyonlands National Park to the Green’s confluence with the Colorado River, then up that stream to Moab.

Boaters not wanting to race could follow the route on the more sedate Friendship Cruise, departing a day earlier. Providing one turns up the Colorado River, the route offers basically flat water the entire way. Miss the confluence, however, and it’s a boat-mangling downstream ride through the thundering rapids of Cataract Canyon.

That happened to one Friendship Cruise motorboat carrying two men and a woman. They missed a planned stop 68 miles downstream at Mineral Bottom and 52 miles later, they missed their turn up the Colorado. After plunging through a pair of Cataract Canyon rapids, they staggered into a river rafters’ camp at 10 p.m. The National Park Service ultimately rescued the trio and hauled their boat, allegedly awash in empty beer cans, downstream to Lake Powell.

These days, the boat launch at Green River State Park mostly serves rafters and kayakers floating through Labyrinth Canyon to Mineral Bottom. It’s not uncommon to encounter groups of young people occupying the park’s group campsites the night before launching downstream.

Many of Utah’s 46 state parks offer hiking trails. For those who don’t believe that “golf is a good walk spoiled,” Green River State Park sports a scenic, nine-hole riverside golf course instead of backcountry trails. With three par-5 holes, golfers consider it to be a somewhat challenging course, and it’s inexpensive with nine holes going for $15. For Frisbee-flingers, the park offers 18-holes of disc golf along the perimeter of the conventional course. It’s a mere $10 to play.

Of course, most Green River State Park visitors come to camp. The park offers 59 individual sites with electric and water hookups plus three group campsites scattered around a shady, riverside oasis of grassy lawns and towering trees. There are flush toilet restrooms, showers and an RV dump station. For those preferring to “camp” behind solid walls, the park offers a cabin with beds but no bathroom along with a quartet of new, tiny homes featuring running water, microwave ovens, toilets, showers and decks overlooking the river.

Located a day’s drive from Denver, Salt Lake City and Las Vegas, many campers use Green River as a convenient stopover point on their way to somewhere else. For others, Green River can serve as an extended-stay hub for exploring southeastern Utah’s famed canyon country. Moab, Arches, Canyonlands, Dead Horse Point, Goblin Valley and Capital Reef all lie less than a 90-minute drive away.

In addition to those celebrated sites, inquisitive travelers will find much more to see in the Green River area. At the John Wesley Powell River History Museum, visitors can learn about the one-armed explorer’s voyage down the Green and Colorado rivers, examine historic river boats and max-out their credit cards in the book section of the gallery’s gift shop. The museum serves as the local visitor information center, and their parking lot offers eight Tesla supercharger stations.


Once a major railroad town, Green River still offers an Amtrak stop. In its heyday, the area around the railyards abounded with beer joints, only one of which still stands. Known as Ray’s Tavern, it was founded in the 1940s by Ray Sherrill. The only food they served back then were Stewart Sandwiches, which were frozen hamburgers they’d run through a grill on a conveyor belt. When Sherrill retired, the new owner turned Ray’s into an actual restaurant serving real, half-pound hamburgers, hand-cut fries, chops and steaks, along with beer on tap. Their burgers have been featured on lists of Utah’s best.

Another popular place to dine are the food trucks of Tacos la Pasadita, which offers traditional Mexican fare. Across from the taco trucks lies OK Anderson City Park where a 1960s-vintage, Athena missile sits on display. From 1964 to 1974, the U.S. Air Force launched these missiles from Green River. From here, the rockets would fly over the Four Corners region to a landing site at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Occasionally, things didn’t go as planned. In 1970, instead of landing in the state of New Mexico, one of Green River’s missiles flew across the international border and crashed in Old Mexico.

The military is gone now, but a few of the launch site’s abandoned buildings still stand in the hills southeast of town. They lie off a series of graded roads that lead to Crystal Geyser, a rare, cold-water, carbon dioxide-powered geyser that spouts from a riverside drill pipe left by an oil company in 1935. Locals claim the geyser formerly erupted every four hours or so and would shoot up over 100 feet. Vandals, including someone who dropped dynamite down the pipe, have altered the flow. These days, eruptions come less often and spurt far fewer feet in the air.

Visitors willing to get their cars dusty can visit historic, Fremont-culture rock art sites near Green River. A few, like the Black Dragon and Head of Sinbad sites lie off back roads best navigated with higher clearance vehicles. Others, such as those near the ghost town of Sego, can be reached in Grandma’s Buick.

Off-pavement drivers can also visit the site of a backcountry cabin left by the Swasey brothers, who ran cattle in the Green River area a century ago. The brothers’ name graces a few other places in the area, such as Swasey’s Beach, a sandy bank along the river north of town. In the summer, locals come here to picnic, camp and take turns inner tubing through an upstream rapid, also named for the Swasey brothers.


Across the river from Swasey’s Beach rises the towering mass of Gunnison Butte. Below stretch farm fields. While the town was once rife with peach orchards, today’s Green River is best known for its delicious melons. On the third weekend of September, Green River celebrates its signature crop with a Melon Days Festival. There’s a parade and free melon slices down at the park along with vendors, dances, races, ballgames, target shoots and, of course, a golf tournament. The town triples in size.

Anyone thinking of camping at Green River State Park during Melon Days will need to make a campsite reservation when they first become available, four months in advance. Campsites run $45 per night and reservations: 800-322-3770.