Every so often we plan an activity or a series of activities on one of our trips that mostly or completely falls flat. This post is unfortunately about one of those times. Sorry.
What is it about dinosaurs that captures our imagination? Is is the size? The sheer variety of different animals that have been discovered? Is it the way they seemingly all disappeared at one time sort of mysteriously (although I thought I already solved that one before my 2017 trip to Mexico)? Is it something else? It's got to be because these things are utterly unlike anything we have on Earth today, right? Right? Who knows!
When I was a kid I loved dinosaurs. I guess I'm not unusual in that respect. Seems like every kid goes through some sort of phase like that. I remember my mom and dad taking me to London when I was growing up in England to see the diplodocus skeleton at the Natural History Museum. I don't remember actually seeing the skeleton (which it turns out was just a plaster cast) but I remember the significance of being taken to London just for that reason. My dinosaur fascination as a boy must have been important enough for my parents to venture to London with me and my sister.
Some kids grow out of their dinosaur phase. I'm not completely confident that I did. There's definitely a hold on me there. I wasted no time in 1993 going to the movies to see Jurassic Park and it remains one of my go to I'll-watch-anytime movies today. So when we were planning our Colorado and Utah getaway and I found out there were a number of accessible dino-themed sites, I was in. We had to add this stuff to our agenda.
Favorite dinosaur of all time, by the way...the ankylosaurus. My dad made me one from a kit and hand painted it when I was growing up. Always been my fav since then.
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| The corner of Stegosaurus Freeway and Brontosaurus Boulevard, Dinosaur, CO. |
We had a plan. And it was a good one, I swear. If everything came together perfectly.
After our time in Moab, we planned to head north in Utah to Dinosaur National Monument, which perhaps obviously is dinosaur themed. A little research about what there was to do on the way uncovered (pun intended) a couple of spots close to Moab where actual millennia-old dinosaur footprints can still be found. Plus we found an actual working dinosaur excavation going on around the town of Cleveland, Utah about two and a half hours to the north and west of where we were staying near Arches. Not exactly on the way but there isn't exactly a road leading directly north from Moab to Dinosaur National Monument either. You either have to go east through Colorado and then west back into Utah or go west and then east close to Cleveland. We figured we'd take the slightly longer way and take a chance on seeing a genuine fossil excavation before our very eyes.
All that and then seeing what there was to see at Dinosaur National Monument sounded like it added up to a pretty packed day or two of dino-sights.
Dinosaur was declared a National Monument in 1915 after the discovery of dinosaur bones there earlier in the century by paleontologist Earl Douglass. I guess the story here is that there were a significant number of dinosaurs in present day northeast Utah that died near a river's edge during a drought in the Jurassic period. Later on when the river was restored and ultimately flooded, it washed the skeletons of all the dead dinosaurs intact down to a localized area, essentially concentrating a great many bones into a very small area. When Douglass found the first fossils, he kept digging and found more and more and more, layer upon layer upon layer.
By the time Douglass was done at the site, he'd filled the halls of museums all over the United States and abroad, including at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh (they funded Douglass' work), the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. The quarry set up on the site produced more full skeletons than any other site in the world. This is significant stuff, folks. And they didn't even take all of the bones out of the place.
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| A fragment of the Morrison Formation with the Quarry Exhibit Hall beyond. |
Sounds awesome, right? It did to us. In fact, it still does to us. We'd love to visit there one day. We knew pretty much for certain that the Hall would be closed when we visited. I mean nothing else indoors and tourist-y not privately owned was open anywhere we went in Utah. So on Thursday, June 25, 2020 we missed out on the Quarry Exhibit Hall as we expected we would. But we were surprised by how closely we missed it. If we'd have been there one week later, we'd have been in. The Hall opened the following Tuesday. Oh well, at least we still had a working quarry, two sets of dinosaur tracks and the Fossil Discovery Trail at Dinosaur National Monument.
Not so much. I know I've whined more than my fair share about the heat on this trip and how it kept us from doing some things we wanted to do. This is the last time I will do this, I promise but...it was just too hot to make it to one of the sets of tracks. High 90s combined with very unsure and incomplete signage on Bureau of Land Management property made us give up the ghost at the Mill Canyon Dinosaur Trail. We also missed out on the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry that we had planned along our route from Maob to Dinosaur National Monument. We needed it open Wednesday. It's not. Need to be there Thursday through Sunday to visit. We didn't know that when we planned the trip because 2020 hours hadn't been published yet.
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| Stegosaurus outside the Dinosaur National Monument Quarry Visitor Center. |
After all that we ended up with the Fossil Discovery Trail and one dinosaur footprints site. Let's make the most of this thing!!!!
There is a point in the movie Jurassic Park where Jeff Goldblum's character, Dr. Ian Malcolm, while on the pilot ride through the Park and having seen zero dinosaurs, asks the Park's creator, John Hammond: "Now eventually you might have dinosaurs on your dinosaur tour, right?"
I know I've plugged this movie as a classic in this post already but let me say that there are a few extremely teachable and relevant-to-everyday-life quotes in this movie, all of which seem to come from Ian Malcolm's mouth. The obvious one here is "life finds a way" but there's also "your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should." I use variants of that last one all the time, mostly related to architects who want to try something they think is new. The book is even better than the movie. Enough plugging. Back to our hike along Fossil Discovery Trail, not that I was necessarily talking about that yet.
I related all that information because there was a point along Fossil Discovery Trail that I exclaimed in the hot morning Utah sun (straight in our faces again like at Delicate Arch in Arches) "now eventually they might have fossils on this fossil discovery trail, right?" About a half mile into the 1.2 mile trail (one way) we hadn't seen a darned thing. No fossils, no signs for fossils, heck, not even any signs for non-fossils. We did pass a couple of petroglyphs but no hint that we were on a fossil trail. Were we even?
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| View from a spot probably in the middle third of the Fossil Discovery Trail. |
There were two other spots along the Trail that contained fossil signage. One at a dead end which noted the presence of clams (again nothing) and one next to a giant tilted wall of stone which read, in part, "The Fossil Discovery Trail passes through several layers of tilted rock in which a variety of fossils are easily visible."
Easily? Really? I know I don't have the best eyesight in the world but finding fossils on this massive stone face was not easy by any stretch of the imagination. We looked at this thing from every angle we could. We looked at it coming and going. We climbed the stairs that run the length of the wall (twice) and stopped a different points on the way up and the way down and scanned every square inch we could. We found one and that was only because it was next to a painted white arrow pointing right at it. Maybe some sort of spine.
If it wasn't for the arrow, we likely wouldn't have spotted what we saw. We were informed (again by the very helpful signs) that the larger bones are marked by white arrows. Despite that giveaway, we could only spot one fragment of dinosaur, probably because we could only find one white arrow.
The Fossil Discovery Trail is typically a 1.2 mile walk, because one leg of the walk is usually taken on the shuttle bus that takes you from the Visitor Center to the Quarry Exhibit Hall or vice versa. We walked the Trail both ways because obviously no shuttle buses run when the Hall is closed. I like treasure hunts. I also like finding treasure. Treasure hunts with no treasure are not so much fun.
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| See the fossilized fish scales? No? Neither did we. |
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| Finally a dinosaur fragment. The white arrow helped a ton. |
The Copper Ridge Dinosaur Tracks are located about two miles off US-191 just north of Moab. The road that takes you there is a dirt and gravel surface and despite the short length it will take you between 5 and 10 minutes to eventually get to a small parking area with a notice board of sorts. Head up the hill about 200 yards on what looks like it's probably a path and you'll come to two areas that look like dried mud with some depressions or marks in the surface and a couple of silver signs. You've reached your destination.
The tracks at Copper Ridge are the same sort of vintage as the fossils that Earl Douglass found (but we didn't) at Dinosaur National Monument. That is Jurassic period about 150 million years ago. They actually come from the same layer of stuff in the Earth on a vast plain that covers parts of several present day states called the Morrison Formation.
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| Sauropod tracks!!! |
On one level, these things are quite unremarkable. I guess it's cool to walk alongside where a dinosaur once walked doing nothing special. It's interesting to see how big their strides were as you step near the tracks made so long ago. This works better with the sauropod tracks since the steps are deeper and more numerous; while the signs told us there were more than one carnivore tracks, it also said the tracks are frequently filled with dust and may not be visible. We saw one. After five minutes or so at both sites, we were about done.
After we left, though, I realized something truly amazing and that's simply that these things are even here any more. I mean, it's not like the dinosaurs that made these tracks walked by where we stood last week or last year or even last century. We are talking 150 million years here. And they are still there for me to walk by and look at for five minutes. It's also not like they have been protected and preserved all this time. Or really any time at all. There aren't even any barriers preventing clueless tourists from just walking right over them today. They are just in the middle of the Utah desert for anyone to stumble upon. Think about how many times something could have potentially wiped these things off the face of the Earth the last 150 million times our rock rotated around the sun. No earthquakes, no floods, no thieves, no mudslides, no rocks falling, not even another dinosaur coming by the very next day and wiping their prints away. Nothing for a long, long, long time has disturbed what two dinosaurs made just by walking through something soft enough to leave an impression. How amazing is that? These things are the ultimate survivors.
I don't feel like I missed out on anything here by leaving after five minutes, but I think the more time I spend away from our trip, the more I appreciate the good fortune through an enormous amount of years that allowed me to see what I saw on that hill up on Copper Ridge. I feel like we took in something really consequential, even though it probably wasn't anywhere near that in the lives of two extinct creatures.
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| Carnivore footprints!!! |
While this ended up falling far short of my best dino-tour ever (!!) that I had planned. We still had a few memorable experiences. I won't forget those tracks any time soon.
We also got some great looks at all sorts of dinosaur statues in varying shades of realism, including the pretty realistic stegosaurus shown above (apparently produced for the 1964-65 New York World's Fair) and the not-so-realistic-but-oh-so-fun pink dinosaur built in 1958 to advertise the now demolished Dine-A-Ville Motel in Vernal, Utah. We also found a number of wholly unlifelike and very small dinosaurs in the town of Dinosaur, Colorado just before we drove by a dispensary with some sort of primitive and likely stoned metal dinosaur sculpture out front.
On top of all that, we got up close and personal with the Green River that we'd seen from a distance in Canyonlands National Park earlier in the week.
Best dinosaur tour ever? Not so much. Worth it? Completely. Sometimes you don't find what you hope for when you travel. If there was a day we could have cut out and missed very little, it would have been our day in Dinosaur National Monument. But we didn't know that then and what else were we going to do? We were in the middle of the desert. Hike some more in Canyonlands? Not in that heat. No regrets here. Besides, the best of this trip was yet to come when we passed back into Colorado.
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| We had to stop at the Sinclair for gas on this trip. HAD TO!!! |
How We Did It
The Utah side of Dinosaur National Monument is open almost every day of the year. The Quarry Visitor Center is open most days from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and the Quarry Exhibit Hall is open most of those same days from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. or maybe even later. That is when there's not a global pandemic in full force causing stuff to close in Utah. Check their website for hours before you go. And I hope when you go that the Quarry Exhibit Hall is open. While we didn't have a whole lot of success on the Fossil Discovery Trail, I'd recommend a one way trip anyway. Maybe your eyes are better at spotting white arrows on a rock wall than ours are.
The Copper Ridge Dinosaur Tracks and the Mill Canyon Dinosaur Tracks are both on land owned and maintained by the Bureau of Land Management, meaning it's pretty much just unregulated desert wilderness. The tracks themselves at Copper Ridge are pretty accessible and easy to find. Just park near the sign and hike up the hill. When you get to the top of the hill, the tracks are visible on the right. As mentioned above, we turned back at Mill Canyon not knowing how much longer we would have to walk to find what we wanted. I hope you have better luck. Click the name of each site in this paragraph to visit the BLM's site with some rudimentary descriptions and maps. Good luck!
The Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry is located at Jurassic National Monument which is another spot administered by the Bureau of Land Management. 2020 visitor hours are Thursday through Sunday 10 a.m to 5 p.m. April 2 through October 31. I'd love to be able to tell you it was amazing or really anything about this place but as you know we never made it. Visit the BLM's sites for the Quarry and the Monument by clicking the links earlier in this paragraph.
Finally, follow in our footsteps on this trip and I'm sure you'll see all sorts of dinosaur sculptures. Take pictures and have fun.
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