"The horizon to the north and east is banked with rock-tipped blue mountains, so softened by haze and distance that the farther peaks melt imperceptibly into the sky, like blue-gray clouds with patches of white among them.

(Wyoming: A Guide to Its History, Highways and People. 1941, pg 349)

Bridger Country contains the broad sweep of the Green River Basin from Cora southward to the Uinta Mountains and westward to the edge of the Bear River drainage. The area is ringed by the Wind River, Gros Ventre, Wyoming, Salt River, Commissary Ridge, Sublette and Uinta Ranges.

This area is extremely rich in the colorful history of early exploration and development in the West. The first white man to visit the Upper Green river Country appears to have been Wilson Price Hunt who, in 1811, descended from Union Pass, entered the area around Beaver Ridge, and then traveled west along the Hoback River on his way to Astoria. The following year Robert Stuart and a group of Astorians traveling east, discovered the important South Pass travel route which they took to the Sweetwater River which was later to become the Oregon Trail. By the time of the first Trapper Rendezvous, held in 1825 on the Henry's Fork below modern day Burntfork, much of the Green River Country was explored and trapped by William Ashley's Mountain Men. The popularity of the mountain man/trapper rendezvous grew until, all told, some 250-300 whites and a sizable encampment of Indians, especially Shoshones, attended the 1833 Rendezvous, then held between Fort Bonneville and Trapper's Point. The 1833 rendezvous was the first of six, and considered by some to be the last "pure" rendezvous. The Bridger Wilderness, and the Bridger National Forest, present-day reminders of this era, are named for explorer, trapper, and mountain man, Jim Bridger.

Within the Bridger Country, pieces and remnants of the natural landscape which witnessed the passing of this history still exist. In addition, the evidence of Native American remains is scattered throughout Bridger Country. Documented sites and remains from the very early Paleo-Indian period (before 7,500 B.P.) to the Late Prehistoric Period (1,500-200 B.P.) have been located from the Green River Valley to the Wind River Mountains.

Tabernacle Butte, a portion of the Elk Mountain proposed wilderness area, is renowned as a one-of-a-kind fossil site due to the abundance and beautiful preservation of 45-50 million year old vertebrate fossils. A spectacular assemblage of vertebrates and invertebrates is found in the Green River Formation of Eocene age, part of which is now the Fossil Butte National Monument just west of Kemmerer.

Great tributaries of the Green River surge through this high, wind-blown desert country:  Big Sandy, New Fork, Cottonwood, Piney, La Barge, Fontenelle, and Hams Fork, to name but a few – while the Smith and Thomas Forks flow into the Bear River.