We are not sure why, but we left Grand Tetons on Friday morning and drove down thru Rock Springs, WY and then past Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area to Dinosaur National Monument in Utah. Flaming Gorge Lake is beautiful but, since we don't have a speed boat, we chose to keep moving. It was a long day of driving on narrow, rough roads while fighting a 30 - 40 mph cross wind!
Dinosaur National Monument crosses the state line of Utah and Colorado. The only park campground is in Utah not far from Jensen. This is a very dry, arid land where land upheavals have made many canyons, mesas, and gorges. The campground is located at the bottom of a small canyon on the Green River which empties into the Colorado River. We are in a grove of giant, ancient cottonwoods. The bad part is that these trees are so old that they are starting to fall apart so the park has closed about 1/4 of the campsites that are under theses ancient trees. We're guessing they will be cut down.
Today, we visited the Quarry Visitor Center which is a building built over a huge wall of dinosaur bones. Some time in the Jurassic Period this area was a flat plane with a large river running through it. All the animals would come here for water. But during a severe drought many dinosaurs died near this river or they were hanging around the river when a huge flood washed all the dead and living dinosaurs down the river and into a pile that was soon covered with sand and silt. Then the earth moved, covering the pile, compressing it and then it shifted, buckled and eroded. In 1909 paleontologist Earl Douglass saw the tail bones of five Camarasaurus and the rest is history. Many reconstructed skeletons are at the Carnegie museum in Pittsburgh, PA.
The rest of the park has no bones but lots of petroglyphs and evidence of early Indians. Its the land that we find interesting. We drove to the second entrance into the park at Dinosaur, CO. The road rises up to the top of a mesa and then follows it all the way to the confluence of the Green and Yampa Rivers. We took a two mile round trip hike to a point where we could almost see where both rivers meet but a large rock formation called the Steamboat Rock blocks our view. We are at about 7700 feet elevation so the temperature is reasonably moderate and the views would be exceptional but for the smoke and haze.
The trip back to the campground was interesting as we drove cross country instead of on the highway. We were on top of Blue Mountain, a rather flat topped high land covered with scrub, pinion pines and cows roaming free. Then we descended to the river and arrived back in the campground. We made a short stop at Josie Morris's Cabin to see how a single lady lived off the land for over 50 years by herself with some help from her sons and friends. She married and divorced 5 times before she said enough of that. She was still living by herself when she died at the age of 90.
