Green River Basin Scenic Byway officially an All-American Road

 

Tyler Johnson, [email protected]

SWEETWATER COUNTY, WYOMING (June 14, 2021) – It’s official. After years of planning and filing applications, Green River Basin Scenic Byway is now an All-American Road.

 

A ribbon-cutting ceremony was held at mile marker 511 on U.S. 191 on June 9 to celebrate. The scenic byway stretch in Wyoming is now the 37th All-American Road in the United States.

“The secret in our backyard is no longer a secret. Welcome to the Green River Basin All-American Road,” said Jenissa Meredith, Executive Director of Sweetwater County Travel and Tourism.

“I’m really excited. This has been decades in the making. I came on board in 2007 and they were preparing an application at that time, so I had no idea what I was getting in to. To see it come to fruition is incredible.”

Meredith said that having an All-American Road in the community is a great opportunity for travel and tourism in Sweetwater County.

“An All-American Road is a destination that people base their entire trip around. They come just for that All-American Road,” she said.

“It’s huge for tourism. People plan their entire trips around scenic byways. A scenic drive is not only attractive to the national park traveler or the empty nester. People want a scenic drive for wherever their going.”

 

An All-American Road clears the path for more turnarounds, rest areas and restrooms along the road. Meredith said that there will probably up to seven different turnarounds in the future.

“We have two or three (turnouts) already on the list. There’s probably going to be five to seven. It might take several years. The first funding cycle for the Federal Highway Administration to fund the scenic byways is a $16-million funding round and that’s for all 184 byways in the country,” she said.

“We’ll have a small project application for that and over the years, we’ll build bigger projects. We need to get the engineering figured out for all the sites we want to develop and have that plan ready for to submit every time a funding cycle becomes available.”