Wind River Range. The Wind River Range is a mountain range of the Rocky Mountains in western Wyoming in the United States. The range runs roughly NW-SE for approximately 100 mi. The Continental Divide follows the crest of the range and includes Gannett Peak, which at 13,802 ft, is the highest peak in Wyoming; and also Fremont Peak at 13,750 ft, the third highest peak in Wyoming. There are more than 40 other named peaks in excess of 12,999 ft. With the exception of the Grand Teton in the Teton Range, the next 19 highest peaks in Wyoming after Gannett are also in the Winds. Two large national forests including three wilderness areas encompass most of the mountain range. Shoshone National Forest is on the eastern side of the continental divide while Bridger-Teton National Forest is on the west. Both national forests and the entire mountain range are an integral part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Portions of the east side of the range are inside the Wind River Indian Reservation. Indigenous peoples of the Great Basin, such as the Shoshones and Absarokas Native Americans, lived in the range beginning 7000 and 9000 years ago. Villages as high as 10,000 ft in elevation, dating from 700 to 2000 BC, have recently been studied by archaeologists. These villages were established by the Sheepeater band of Shoshone during pine nut harvesting season. One, dubbed High Rise, has 60 lodges over a space of 26 acres and was recently added to the National Register of Historic Places. One of the men from the Lewis and Clark expedition, John Colter, is thought to be the first European American person to view the range when he visited the area around 1807, though little is known about his travels through the area. In 1812, a party led by Wilson Price Hunt were the first to cross South Pass, at the southern end of the range, the pass which marked the continental divide and crest of the Rocky Mountains and became an important portion of the Oregon Trail. Climbing was pursued in the mid to late 1800s by men such as John C. Fremont, typically for the purpose of surveying the region. Early climbers to come purely for recreation began arriving in the 1920s. Gannett Peak, the range and Wyoming's tallest, was first climbed by Arthur Tate and Floyd Stahlnaker in 1922. Most of the early climbing in the region focused around the Titcomb Basin, slowly radiating outwards. Today, the Titcomb Basin remains one of the area's busiest recreation attractions along with the Cirque of the Towers to the south. Much of the Wind River Range received federal protection as National Forest primitive areas during 1931-32. The Wind River Range is now largely protected by three federal wilderness areas. These include the Bridger Wilderness on the western slope, designated in 1964, and the Fitzpatrick Wilderness and Popo Agie Wilderness on the eastern slope, designated in 1976 and 1984 respectively. Together these wilderness areas protect 728,020 acres, making the Wind River Range one of the largest road-free areas in the continental United States. Part of the eastern slope of the Wind River Range is also under the protection of the Wind River Indian Reservation. The Winds are composed primarily of a granitic batholith which is granite rock formed deep under the surface of the Earth, over one billion years ago. Over hundreds of millions of years, rocks that were once covering this batholith eroded away. As the land continued to rise during the Laramide orogeny, further erosion occurred until all that remained were the granitic rocks. The ice ages beginning 500,000 years ago began carving the rocks into their present shapes. Within the Winds, numerous lakes were formed by the glaciers and numerous cirques, or circular valleys, were carved out of the rocks, the most well known being the Cirque of the Towers, in the southern section of the range. Shoshone National Forest claims that there are 16 named and 140 unnamed glaciers just on the east side of the range for a total of 156, with another 27 reported by Bridger-Teton National Forest for the western slopes of the range. Several of these are the largest glaciers in the U.S. Rocky Mountains. Gannett Glacier which flows down the north slope of Gannett Peak, is the largest single glacier in the Rocky Mountains of the U.S., and is located in the Fitzpatrick Wilderness in Shoshone National Forest. Several major rivers have headwaters on either side of the range. The Green and Big Sandy rivers drain southward from the west side of the range, while the Wind River drains eastward through the Shoshone Basin. The Green is the largest fork of the Colorado River while the Wind River, after changing its name to the Bighorn River, is the largest fork of the Yellowstone River.