We settled in for a nice long drive out of Utah, into Colorado, and back into Utah for Dinosaur National Monument, Quarry Visitor Center. There was some really nice scenery on the way.
The town of Dinosaur, Colorado, really goes all out. Dinosaur statues everywhere and street names named after dinosaurs!
Fortunately, that mountain was in the park, so once we entered and went into the Visitor Center, we learned that it was called Split Mountain.
I liked the way this small formation resembled the plates on the back of a dinosaur!
Inside the Visitor Center, you can buy casts of dinosaur bones.
They aren't cheap! This Allosaurus foot is $580!
After we looked around the gift shop and visitor center, we talked to one of the rangers for information. He was very nice and informative. The park has an Exhibit Hall that is highly recommended and a road tour. The parking lot of the Exhibit Hall is small, so they recommend that most people please take the shuttle that runs from the visitor center to the Exhibit Hall. There is also a path you can walk from the visitor center to the Exhibit Hall called the Fossil Discovery Trail. The trail goes up a steep incline at the end, so be prepared if you take it. We started it, but were disappointed when none of the fossils were marked and we learned that we would have failed the entrance exam to paleontology school. They mostly just looked like rocks to us. There were no markers telling where the fossils were or explaining how to find them.
We met another couple walking back from the Exhibit Hall who said the rest of the trail was more of the same, and they also failed the exam, so we turned around and went back to the car. We decided to do the Cub Creek Scenic Drive first with the little pamphlet we bought at the Visitor Center for a buck, almost covering the likely cost of printing. The pamphlet was very informative, and the corresponding stops were marked with little lizards in the pamphlet and on the signs. One thing the pamphlet taught me is the difference between petroglyphs and pictographs. Pictographs are paintings and petroglyphs are etchings. Some of the lizard stops were trailheads that we didn't take, but a lot of it was very interesting.
Much of the formations here were made by two separate tectonic plates pushing them from opposite directions and then erosion happening over the top. This resulted in different colors that should have been lower in the substrate being pushed higher. It also caused some of these ridges like the one in the picture below.
Split Mountain (the one I followed before entering the park) got its name because the Green River splits it in two. While most of the mountains around are formed from sandstone rich with iron oxide, giving them a red color, Split Mountain is made from Weber Sandstone, which is high is limestone. Why this one mountain is limestone while the others are iron oxide has not been answered to my knowledge. At least I can't find an answer no matter how hard I look.
There is a private ranch in the middle of the park.
These bands are known as the Morrison Formation. It was caused by mud and silt from various times of drought and flood and everything in between. Scientists believe there would be massive die off in times of drought, and the carcasses of the animals, including dinosaurs, would collect in the river beds. Once the rains came, the carcasses and bones were carried downstream where they were buried in mud and sand which preserved them.
As we followed the lizards on the signs, they directed us to unpaved roads. Who'da thought I would take him off the pavement? When have I ever done that? At least this one was regularly graded.
We ended up at Green River's Placer Point, which is a bend where a failed gold mining effort was attempted. Note the signs about protected and invasive fish species in the river. Peregrine falcon supposedly nest here, but we must have been here at the wrong time of year. We didn't see or hear anything that resembled raptors.
There was a side road where we could have gone to look at more petroglyphs on land under the control of the Bureau of Land Management. You had to go through private property to get there, though, and Bruce was uncomfortable, even though the pamphlet says there is an easement and that you just have to leave the gates either closed or open, whichever position you find them. I agreed, though, that we have seen a lot of petroglyphs, so missing them was no big deal.
This rock formation is currently called Turtle Rock. With more erosion, it may get a different name in the future.
This is Elephant Toes Butte. The middle schooler in me loved calling it Elephant Toe Butt. It exemplifies a different type of formation than most of the ones in the park. Where most formations were from upfolds and erosion caused by pressure from tectonic plates, this was nugget sandstone from prehitoric dunes that became compressed into rock.
See, we didn't miss anything with the petroglyphs on BLM lands. All we had to do was drive a little further to come across many more. Some of these are close to the road, but the last two (the lizards and the flute player) are high on a cliff and are giant! I got two people in the frame of the lizards so you can see how large the etchings are. They were visible with the naked eye once I found them in the camera. Bruce found them without using the camera.
The last lizard sign post stop was the homestead of a lady named Josie Morris. Josie wasn't a traditional, "wife and mother" type of woman. She married five times with four of those marriages ending in divorce, which was unheard of at that time. She built this cabin on her homestead in 1935 and lived here until her death from complications of a broken hip in 1964. She used the box canyons to contain her livestock, only needing to construct a fence and gate on one side. I liked the story about how she dealt with a water rights issue. Since the downstream neighbor owned the rights to all surface water than flowed into Cub Creek, Josie learned that only applied to water that flowed above the surface. Josie was able to slow the water flow so that it would seep into the ground, where she was able to harvest it for her own use, ensuring that no water from the spring that crossed her land made it to Cub Creek and the downstream owner.
Here are some pictures of Josie's cabin.
After this, we turned around and went back, going to the Exhibit Hall. The Exhibit Hall is located in the quarry section of the park, close to the visitor center, where the dinosaur bones had been excavated before. The first discovery was made in 1909 by Earl Douglass, a paleontologist from Pittsburgh with the Carnegie Museum. The quarry had so many dinosaur fossils, that Douglass petitioned President Wilson to protect the area, and in 1915, he did just that by designating the quarry and its 80 surrounding acres as a national monument. By the time the Carnegie Museum decided they had plenty and released its claim to the quarry, remains of 10 different species of dinosaurs had been found. Douglass, however, hadn't had his fill of the quarry, though, and he continued to work at the quarry until his death in 1931. One of his requests was to preserve part of the quarry as is, a way to allow people to see what the bones and fossils look like in the mountain. Thus, the Exhibit Hall was created in just that manner. One side of the building is just a cross section of the interior of the mountain with bones and fossils intact as they were embedded in the rock. It's really quite amazing! I highly suggest making the trip out here just for this!
They have life-sized casts of bones harvested from the quarry, including nearby sections that are still actively being excavated. This is the femur of an adult camarasaurus.
This is a small crocodile. They had some samples that were so small they had magnifying glass in front of them.
A lower section of the wall had signs that invited visitors to touch and feel the bones. They did caution you not to climb on them, though. For a $1 donation (again, probably not even enough to cover the cost of printing), you can get a pamphlet indexing most of the different bones in the Exhibit Hall, helping you learn how they would be put together. These bones are numbered and indexed just as they would have been if they had been fully excavated. I've never seen anything like this.
While sitting in the car in the parking lot of the Exhibit Hall, I started looking for a hotel room for the night. There is one thing Dinosaur, Colorado, does not have and that is a hotel that advertises on Google. We had to drive all the way to Craig to get a room. I was really looking forward to staying in Dinosaur, but it was not to be. As we were driving through, we did see a small hotel, but we had already booked the one in Craig. On the way, we drove past a property that had these sculptures of a variety of prehistoric and current real and mythical creatures. I wasn't able to get pictures of all of them because some were pretty far off the road, and we were driving. It was really neat, but I've not been able to find any information about it. If anybody knows about this installation on Colorado Highway 40 between Dinosaur and Craig, please let me know.
Once we got to Craig and were checking into our hotel, we found that they had no more ground floor rooms. This was a pretty big hotel and not the only one in town. We couldn't really imagine what was going on in this small town that would have such a draw. It is hunting season, but really?! We did see lots of folks in hunting clothes and several rifle cases, so maybe it was all hunting. Anyway, she upgraded us from a double room to a king suite, so we really can't complain. It had a full sized refrigerator/freezer, so we were able to freeze the gel packs again and avoid another bag of ice that would melt into water in the cooler! We had been planning to eat the hamburgers I had cooked for us before leaving, but we looked in the notebook in the room and found a place we just had to try - The Sizzling Pickle! And of course, Bruce had to get a T-shirt!
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It was really good, so if you're ever in Craig, Colorado... They had a special on ribs, and they were so tender that the bones came out with just barely touching them. The half rack was truly a half rack instead of just four bones. They were so tender that I had difficulty putting the leftovers in a go box because they kept falling apart! All in all, a very good day with more coming up!
