HEADWATERS: The Weber River

Many Utahns don't realize that the Bear, Weber and Provo Rivers all have their headwaters high in the Uinta Mountains. This is the second of three brief articles by Margaret Pettis.

The Weber River can perhaps be traced to her source in a tiny stone cup of melted snow high up the wall of Notch Mt. in the HUPC-proposed Mt. Watson Wilderness. From that mossy, dripping spring, the tiny echoing rivulet winds north down the canyon, through dark forests of bear, marten and goshawk, and begins what one can now recognize as the Weber River.

From here the river winds through the forest and into the lush fields and pastures of Oakley and Peoa, backing at Rockport, flows through the valley of Coalville, stopping again at Echo, and winds below the eagle trees along its banks near Henefer. The Weber turns west at Devil's Slide and Morgan, then takes its last natural northern turn toward Mountain Green before rumbling down the canyon through the mouth of the Wasatch. From here it flattens and enters the urban canal system that transports it west and north through Ogden and its suburbia. The Weber slides finally into the Great Salt Lake at Ogden Bay.

The river that began in a mossy cleft in a mountain of stone, where golden eagles drop on silent wings into the dark forested bowl of the Weber River headwaters, where moose stop to sip from the dips and pools formed by millennial flows of this great river, travels 100 miles only to descend into the shallows of a remnant ancient sea.

And it all started high in the Uinta Mountains.