An Introduction
"If you don't have a healthy watershed, you don't have anything."
Richard Stevens. Ephraim, Utah.
Far Country is the web site of Canyonlands Watershed Council, a coalition of citizens from southeast Utah in Grand and San Juan counties. Our first meeting was April 15, 2009 and this website was launched on October 7, 2009.
We appreciate the definition of a watershed by geographer John Wesley Powell, "that area of land, a bounded hydrologic system, within which all living things are inextricably linked by their common water course and where, as humans settled, simple logic demanded that they become part of a community."
Far Country is an affectionate place name for the geography surrounding the city of Moab, the county seat of Grand County. This landscape is a place of river convergence on a high plateau with sentinel mountains.
Grand County is named after the Grand River which begins at Grand Lake in the Rocky Mountains of northern Colorado. Prior to a formal name change in 1921, the Colorado River began when the Grand joined the Green River 45 miles south of Moab.
San Juan County is named after the San Juan River and the county seat is Monticello.
Combined, Grand and San Juan counties are larger in area than the state of Massachusetts.
The valley of Moab (Spanish Valley) shares a common boundary of neighborhood with San Juan County. This sharing includes the watershed of the La Sal Mountains, the tallest mountains of the Colorado Plateau.