A mere quarter mile below Names Hill is the Fontenelle impoundment, backing up about 12 miles from the Fontenelle Dam itself.

A quick aside; the name honors Lucien Fontenelle, a famous mountain man in his day but overlooked by history. Names Hill is a rocky promontory on which many pioneers carved their names, including Jim Bridger, perhaps the most famous mountain man of them all. (Bridger probably paid, or ordered, someone to do the inscription for him because he was illiterate.)

The Fontenelle impoundment is quite ugly, another dam that probably never should have been built. Politics aside, it has nothing going for it aesthetically. Do not count on the maps when thinking about gas. The crossroads of Fontenelle is as dead as Cisco, Utah. There are no resources between Pinedale and Green River except for the small town of LaBarge.

Just below the dam is the Weeping Rock camp, a BLM site. The name comes from the river bank on river left, where water seeps out through fissures in the rock, feeding plants, insects, and the swallows that feed on them. Apparently fishing is pretty good here. We moved Doug's truck to a point 23 miles down from this camp and then rigged our boats for the upper Seedskadee.

When the mountain men came into the area, they called the Green the Seedskadee. This was the Shoshone name for the river. Most of this section of river is within the Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge was designated in 1965 to mitigate habitat loss from Fontenelle and Flaming Gorge Dams, but time will tell if this will work. The private land above Fontenelle was far more luxuriant and full of wildlife. The dam prevents sediment from building up in the refuge, so the channel has deepened and lost much of it's braided character. Furthermore, without flooding, cottonwoods cannot reproduce. As with all the below dam rivers out west, the cottonwood bosques and all the species associated with them are disappearing.

Although a lot of NWRs allow camping, for some reason this one does not. That put us in a bind because the refuge is about 40 miles long and as usual, we had afternoon wind in the forecast. (I carry a National Weather Service radio for times like this.) A forty mile day seemed impossible. Beyond that, the refuge rangers apparently actually spend a lot of time in the field, because nobody was home at the office and the cell phone numbers offered didn't work. It turns out that the rangers do, in fact, spend time in the field since we met them twice. Stealth camping might not be a good idea. On the other hand, they were very nice people. I think they would issue a ticket with a reluctant smile.

After scouting the situation we came up with a simple solution. 23 miles below Weeping Rock is the Lombard Ferry Historical Site, along with a boat ramp. About a third of a mile away, outside the Refuge, was a BLM gravel pit. We left Doug's truck there and ran from Weeping Rock to the Bridge. While Doug hiked to the truck, I deflated the boats. We loaded boats and all of our gear in the truck, then we ran shuttle down to the next place just below Pioneer Park, 25.5 river miles miles further down. Contrary to the BLM maps this park no longer allows overnight camping, so we found a nice spot just below it. Up at 4:00 AM the next morning, we returned to Lombard Ferry, inflated, launched, ran, pulled out, and recovered the shuttle car.