Prospect Mountain WSA

Steep-shouldered Prospect Mountain is the Western rampart of the Snowy Range. The Platte River, flowing the tanned, translucent brown of Folger’s coffee most of the year, wraps around its base. The WSA is small, and is dominated by the eponymous peak.

The decision of the Carbon County Wyoming Public Lands Initiative meetings was to marry this WSA to its neighboring wilderness–the Platte River Wilderness. You can read about this here on Western Confluence. This merger makes good sense. The WSA is directly adjacent to the current Wilderness boundary with the Platte as the coffee-colored line between them. Thus, the merger would protect a wondrous stretch of river and grow the jewel of the Snowies that is the Platte River Wilderness.

Most folks visiting the Prospect Mountain WSA do so via two paths: they either float its Eastern edge or they drive down a precipitous road bordering the WSA to the North to the Prospect put-in. The float through this portion of the Platte truly is lovely. One can put in at Six-mile Gap and float to Prospect or keep truckin’ towards Saratoga. If you are not a technical boater this is a good reach, you get some whitewater but avoid the challenges of the North Gate rapids that are upstream from Six-mile Gap. See the American Whitewater page here for more.

Walking the riparian corridor in 2026, Prospect Mountain felt like a place from my childhood due to the abundance of insects. I studied insects and plants for a while and got started on that dubious path to employment (didn’t really work out) when I was a kid. I had a collection of over a thousand insects. Chasing butterflies via home-made nets crafted of bent wire-hangers and hot-glued into the stems of sumac was my go-to. My Mom kindly sewed netting on these devices. During my time researching in academia I had a professional net and it wasn’t much better than these DIY jobs. Anyway, back in the day butterflies were way more abundant than they are now. Folks that don’t pay attention to bugs may not have noticed, but there have been precipitous declines across habitats and species all over the world.

As my old PI called it in one of his papers, it is ‘death by a thousand cuts’ for insects–habitat loss is a big driver, invasive species are another (which is itself habitat loss because many insect species don’t eat a wide variety of plants), pesticides, too many windshields, wacky weather due to our climate’s changes, etc. At any rate, populations of insects are in free fall.

So, I was surprised to see hundreds of butterflies sucking the moisture from the mud along the Prospect Mountain WSA boundary. I have not seen so many butterflies (little dotted blues and tiger swallowtails mostly) since the last time I went to the Ecuadorean rain forest.

News

This is one of the WSAs that Barrasso’s bill (S.681) would turn into a Wilderness area (merged with the Platte River Wilderness just east). This was agreed upon during the Carbon County Wyoming Public Lands Initiative meetings. You can read about this here on Western Confluence.

Access

You can drive a low or mid-clearance vehicle on the Prospect Mountain BLM road (directly across from the Big Creek Ranch). Park before the road drops off the hill unless you have a high-clearance rig with four-wheel drive.

Safety

Ticks.

The river can be a serious float at high water if you put in up the canyon. Don’t float it without knowing what you are getting into and having proper gear.

Infrastructure

There is a trail in part of the WSA along the river.

Inspiration