There’s something about dinosaurs that brings out the kid in all of us. Reconstructed dino bones seem to take on a life that skeletons of other animals just can’t match. If you’d like to get your Jurassic on, there are few better places than Dinosaur National Monument.
The park straddles the Colorado-Utah border, and the two sides are vastly different. As one park ranger told us, Utah is bones, Colorado is stones. Almost all of the dinosaur stuff is on the Utah side, while the Colorado side boasts some spectacular geology.
We drove to Dinosaur from Denver, in what we consider our first real RV trip. We had done a shake-down trip a few weeks earlier, and despite copious amounts of rain, all went well. Coming from the east, you first pass the small town of Dinosaur, whose streets are all named after dinosaurs. There’s not much in town, maybe a restaurant or two, and four retail marijuana stores serving a population of less than 300. But it’s the primary entrance for the Colorado side of the park.
Just across the Utah border is the town of Jensen, which isn’t much bigger. You have to drive another 13 miles to Vernal to find hotels, dining, stores and gas stations. We stayed at the Outlaw RV Park in Jensen, which was little more than a gravel parking lot. But the owners were friendly, the coin-operated showers were hot, and it was just a stone’s throw from the primary entrance to the western side of the park.
After we got our RV situated and ate a quick dinner, we hightailed it into the park to catch the 7:30 pm ranger talk at the Green River campground. These take place on select nights in the campground’s amphitheater. We happened upon a presentation about the park’s amphibians: frogs, toads and salamanders. It was a packed crowd and the ranger was both informative and entertaining. We appreciated that he played the sounds of the various frogs and toads via a bluetooth speaker set up behind the audience. It gave the talk a surround sound type of atmosphere.
The next morning we got into the park right around 8 am when the Quarry visitor center and exhibit hall opened. We were the first to hop on the tram for the mile or so ride up to the exhibit hall, with a recorded narrated tour of the geology through which we were passing. For the first 20 minutes, we had the Quarry Exhibit Hall to ourselves.
The exhibit hall is a structure built over a partially excavated wall of dinosaur bones. It was the wish of paleontologist Earl Douglass, who in 1909 found the first dinosaur bones in what would become the park, that part of the bone quarry be set aside for people to see how they were found. The 80-foot wide, 45-foot tall wall is a jumble of 1,500 dinosaur bones and it’s hard to make heads or tails of it without the guide available onsite. The bones come from dozens of different species of dinosaurs from the late Jurassic period, including Allosaurus, Apatosaurus, Camarasaurus, Diplodocus, and Stegosaurus. You view the bones from the second floor, but the true magic comes when you descend to the ground floor, where you can touch several actual dinosaur bones.
Once you’re done in the exhibit hall, you can take the tram back down to the visitor center, but we chose to walk down the Fossil Discovery Trail, which descends about 1.4 miles to the same spot. Some small bones are viewable in the rocks alongside the trail, marked with white arrows. We had a hard time finding them.
Back at the visitor center, we purchased a $1 guide book for the Tour of the Tilted Rocks, which was our next endeavor. Frankly, we barely used the guide book. All of the stops are also noted on the park map. Our first stop was the Swelter Shelter, one of the monument’s oldest known sites of human habitation, dating back some 7,000 years. The pictographs and petroglyphs on the shelter’s walls are newer, about 1,000 years old. At the next stop, we hiked the 2.4-mile Sounds of Silence Trail, a dark red dirt trail that loops around under towering stone walls. About 9 miles from the visitor center, we stopped for a quick look at Turtle Rock, which resembles, you guessed it, a turtle. Another mile up the road, another turnout offered a short trail to some of the most recognizable petroglyphs we had seen, including a bighorn sheep.
The Tilted Rocks scenic drive ends at the site of Josie’s Cabin. Josephine Barrett Morris was a local legend, who settled on this site in 1914. She built multiple cabins on her homestead, which she ranched for 50 years. Her cabin is still standing, but has seen better days. We hiked two trails that start from this site. The Hog Canyon Trail runs 0.8 miles following a small stream across an open area into the mouth of the canyon. Eventually the cliffs close in and the trail dead ends. The Box Canyon Trail is a shorter trail, less than half a mile to the end of the gorge. Josie fenced in this area to corral her pigs.
The following day we headed over to the Colorado side of the park. There was some construction going on, so some of the overlooks and trails we wanted to visit were closed. We drove about an hour to get to Harpers Corner, where a 2-mile trail runs along a narrow ridge to a spectacular viewpoint. Along the way, we stopped at various viewpoints of the Green River as it winds through Whirlpool Canyon, 2,500 feet below the trail. We could see rafters floating by the river, and if we had another day, a rafting trip would likely provide another fascinating perspective on the park’s geology.
We topped off the day driving about an hour to the north side of the park to the Jones Hole Fish Hatchery. It’s about 5 miles as the crow flies from where we had hiked at Harpers Corner, but there’s no way to get across the canyon. At the hatchery, we hiked a couple of miles down the Jones Hole Creek Trail, one of the most beautiful hikes in the park. The trail follows the creek into a canyon surrounded by towering walls. The trail runs 4 miles to the Green River, but a lovely waterfall halfway at Ely Creek makes for a fine destination as well.
We happened to be at Dinosaur for the peak of the Mormon Cricket infestation. We first noticed them on the way there. The road appeared to be covered in mud splatter but then we notice the mud spots were moving. We pulled over and discovered those spots were crickets, or technically, a member of the katydid family. As crickets get squashed on the road, other crickets come to cannibalize them, putting them at extreme risk of getting crushed themselves. Overtime, the cricket carnage piles up on the road. Our truck and RV were covered in bug guts by the time we got home. We cleaned the front of the trailer with the free squeegee at the gas station, but a few days later, we returned to the storage lot with buckets of soapy water to try to remove the rest of the bug splatter.
Dinosaur National Monument was supposed to be the first stop on our epic road trip around the U.S., before we switched from a June to January start date. We also decided that it might be good to schedule a few days in June to visit doctors as we pass through Denver. So we hit Dinosaur this summer instead. So you could say we’ve finally started our Great American RV Trip. Only six more months to go.
