Construction and Cooling:

Construction and Cooling:. River Industries. The Green River has long been a workplace for several major industries, providing jobs to many people in the area. Harvest of railroad ties was one of the first to develop. From 1868 to 1945, spring runoff signaled the arrival of the ties and tie hacks. Tie hacks were men who cut and shaped ties in the forests of the Upper Green River and floated them down to town where they stacked up against a large gate or boom across the river. The hacks' final job was loading ties onto railcars for shipment to creosote treatment plants. Sawn lumber was a related business. A steam-powered sawmill near the confluence of the Green River and Bitter Creek provided lumber for construction of the expanding towns of southwest Wyoming. This mill operated from 1868 to 1920. , In the days before refrigeration, ice harvest was an important seasonal industry. In the winter blocks of natural ice were cut from the frozen river by horse drawn and hand saws. The ice was hauled to ice houses, three each in Green River and Rock Springs, where it was tightly packed and insulated with sawdust. Ice was marketed to homes and businesses where it chilled food and beverage throughout the summer. , Cutting railroad ties and river ice were dangerous jobs for the hardy, adventurous men of the early days. Today, concrete and steel ties replace wood and the modern refrigerator is common-place. While ice houses and tie hacks have disappeared, the fish in the Green River have not. You can still find people "working" on the river today, working to catch the "big one" in the river below.