Brown’s Park

History-minded visitors with more time to spend will want to drive south from Rock Springs to historic Brown’s Park, also known as Brown’s Hole, near the spot where Wyoming, Utah and Colorado join.

Myths and facts merge here. The Park is rich in old west lore. Here Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, Isom Dart, Queen Ann Basset, and Tom Horn roamed. Historians generally agree that it was Horn who killed Dart near Brown’s Park along the Colorado-Wyoming Border on October 3, 1900.

Travelers will find Brown’s Park by driving south from Rock Springs on Wyoming Highway 430 for 55 miles through open desert expanses, until the road turns to gravel at the Colorado border. Continuing south for 22 miles on gravel, the traveler passes through Irish Canyon, until the road hits pavement again at Colorado Highway 318.

This crossroads marks the south end of Brown’s Park. A right turn takes a traveler west and north through the heart of the Park for 16 miles. At that point the road turns to gravel again when it crosses into Utah. Continuing northwest from here to the Green River, the traveler passes the site of Fort Davy Crockett, briefly a fur-trade post in the 1830s, and the Jarvie Ranch, where Scotsman John Jarvie established a store and ferry in 1880 at a river-crossing spot that had been used for centuries. The federal Bureau of Land Management maintains the historic site and a public campground nearby.

Continuing northwest through Clay Basin the traveler re-enters Wyoming and Sweetwater County’s corner of Brown’s Park before intersecting U.S. Highway 191, which leads north 54 miles back to Rock Springs.

The vistas are fantastic, but travelers would do well to take a GPS, water, a map, a sleeping bag, and warm clothes, as there is no cell service and a flat tire leaves the taveler on his own to change or fix it. Nonetheless this drive leads hrough some of the most spectacular scenery in Sweetwater County. It is worth the trip.