Dinosaur National Monument
Dinosaur NM was originally established to protect a site where many sauroid bones were found. The Jurassic stratum they died on got kicked up by a tremendous upheaval that set the normally horizontal layers on their ears. This left the bones sort of mounted vertically on a rock face. Earl Douglass, a paleontologist working for the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, discovered this find in 1909. He worked the face for a number of years, removing fossilized bones and sending them back to Pittsburgh, where I guess you can go see them. In 1915, to preserve what was left, the site became a national monument, and later on, the Green River and Yampa River canyons were added to protect some extraordinary scenery.
An airy glass filled museum was constructed over the bones site to protect it and the visitors. But it started falling apart very soon after it was completed. It was built on a subterranean layer of Bentonite, which swells when it gets wet. After many attempts to stabilize, the building was declared unsafe and closed in 2006. Sadly, they only have a few fossils in cases in a small room in the visitor’s center, and have moved the gift shop into a temporary building, but beyond that, no bones to be seen. They are moving in the direction of a new building, but it will be years.
Which is all fine, since I don’t particularly care about dinosaurs, and the geology of the place is amazing.
We are camped right next to the Green River, with a lush pasture full of cattle across the water, and the tortured white rocks of Split Mountain above us. It is called Split Mountain because the Green River goes right through it running fast and taking a sharp turn. This is still all limestone, and although the hardness does vary, it is still rock that a river worth its salt can cut through like butter given enough time.. But here the river only cut through this mountain, and not the rest of the limestone. Geologists are still arguing over how this happened, but the result is a white upheaval of swirly meringue like rock that is sliced by the river. In the morning light it glows, and one evening there were some clouds and fog and it shimmered pale like moonlight. I thought I was tired of baroque rocks, but this is terrific. The campground for tenters is full of a bike club and it is right under the cliff left by the river cut.
The interpretive autoroute on the west side of the park has stops to explain the bones, the upheaval and the Split, as well as several petroglyph sites. I am fascinated by these orphaned images that stare back at me from the past. Human figures with odd headgear, and sheep. We have several lizard images here, which are new to me, and spiral suns. Nobody has more than vague theories of why they are there and what they mean. The experts can tell generally how old and which ancient culture made them, but that’s about it. Are they history? Are they a to-do list? Are they prayers or offerings to some deity? Life was not easy for the artists, they must have spent most of their time just getting enough to eat and wear, so it is amazing that they spent hours of precious time carving and pecking these designs. And in later times, painting. The figures have presence, and power. They are a little menacing, if I was an evil spirit, I would at least take notice and maybe rethink whatever mayhem I was planning.
At the end of this Tour of the Tilted Rocks, we come to the homestead of Josie Bassett Morris. A small 4 room log cabin, beside a spring and creek. Here Josie came to live by herself at the age of 52. And died at 82 from complications of a broken hip from falling on the ice. She apparently had children as grandchildren came to visit. Got to find out the whole story on her. Her little hideaway up the canyon is heaven, I can see why she stayed, probably against the wishes of her family.
The second tour is called Harper’s Corner, in the Colorado portion of the park, and it takes you up behind the tilted rocks onto a series of high rolling parklands that are covered with lush grass. There are a lot of cattle guards, so I suspect that cattle are brought up here for the summer grazing. This high mesa gradually narrows as we near the pale canyons where the Green River and the Yampa River come together. At the turnouts we can see for miles over more tilted mountains, green plateaus and the cuts of the rivers through the white rock. It feels very familiar, it is a lot like the Big Horn Mountains of WY and MT, and it is gracefully covered by trees and grass for the most part. I imagine that if Monument Valley is the aftermath of some cataclysm, it must have looked like this before everything was blasted away down to the naked red rocks way down below.
It is cloudy with spits of rain and snow, but now and then a shaft of sunlight will give us a spotlight on some distant feature. We come up to a higher park and are suddenly on the edge of a herd of elk, all running away from something, probably us, but they ran across the road in front of us. They are big and ungainly, closer to a moose than a deer, and hold their heads up as they run, sort of like camels. We are very thrilled to see them so close. We turn away to a lookout point and then we come back out onto the main road, they are there again, running in another direction. Further down the road, we run into yet another herd, also running. The truck does make a racket, and we didn’t see anything else they would have been running from. It reminded me of the dream sequence in the movie Never Cry Wolf where the biologist runs naked, hunting caribou with a pack of wolves.
When we get down to the end, we can see the rivers and the canyons all laid out at our feet, everything darkened by the rain except the white sides of the canyons. Echo Park, which lies to our right, was the location of a proposed dam that would have drowned all this lovely country especially the lush parkland as well as the white canyon. There was a pretty stiff fight, and the tree huggers won.
Next day, we head out dropping down to and across Flaming Gorge Dam, which was the alternate dam site to Echo Park. Up the other side and into WY where we hit the flat oil and gas country.
Most towns through here are all oil and gas, the businesses service it, big trailer parks for the pipeline guys, and not very many cattle. We hardly see any vehicles that are not the white pickup trucks of the oil/gas companies. It is dry here and bleak. We stop for the night in Alcova, where dams have created some recreation opportunities, but it is still a kind of forlorn place.
We are on our last day out, and that afternoon we pulled into Hart Ranch. This is as close to home as we have, a familiar place and a beautiful spot for the summer of work.
An airy glass filled museum was constructed over the bones site to protect it and the visitors. But it started falling apart very soon after it was completed. It was built on a subterranean layer of Bentonite, which swells when it gets wet. After many attempts to stabilize, the building was declared unsafe and closed in 2006. Sadly, they only have a few fossils in cases in a small room in the visitor’s center, and have moved the gift shop into a temporary building, but beyond that, no bones to be seen. They are moving in the direction of a new building, but it will be years.
Which is all fine, since I don’t particularly care about dinosaurs, and the geology of the place is amazing.
We are camped right next to the Green River, with a lush pasture full of cattle across the water, and the tortured white rocks of Split Mountain above us. It is called Split Mountain because the Green River goes right through it running fast and taking a sharp turn. This is still all limestone, and although the hardness does vary, it is still rock that a river worth its salt can cut through like butter given enough time.. But here the river only cut through this mountain, and not the rest of the limestone. Geologists are still arguing over how this happened, but the result is a white upheaval of swirly meringue like rock that is sliced by the river. In the morning light it glows, and one evening there were some clouds and fog and it shimmered pale like moonlight. I thought I was tired of baroque rocks, but this is terrific. The campground for tenters is full of a bike club and it is right under the cliff left by the river cut.
The interpretive autoroute on the west side of the park has stops to explain the bones, the upheaval and the Split, as well as several petroglyph sites. I am fascinated by these orphaned images that stare back at me from the past. Human figures with odd headgear, and sheep. We have several lizard images here, which are new to me, and spiral suns. Nobody has more than vague theories of why they are there and what they mean. The experts can tell generally how old and which ancient culture made them, but that’s about it. Are they history? Are they a to-do list? Are they prayers or offerings to some deity? Life was not easy for the artists, they must have spent most of their time just getting enough to eat and wear, so it is amazing that they spent hours of precious time carving and pecking these designs. And in later times, painting. The figures have presence, and power. They are a little menacing, if I was an evil spirit, I would at least take notice and maybe rethink whatever mayhem I was planning.
At the end of this Tour of the Tilted Rocks, we come to the homestead of Josie Bassett Morris. A small 4 room log cabin, beside a spring and creek. Here Josie came to live by herself at the age of 52. And died at 82 from complications of a broken hip from falling on the ice. She apparently had children as grandchildren came to visit. Got to find out the whole story on her. Her little hideaway up the canyon is heaven, I can see why she stayed, probably against the wishes of her family.
The second tour is called Harper’s Corner, in the Colorado portion of the park, and it takes you up behind the tilted rocks onto a series of high rolling parklands that are covered with lush grass. There are a lot of cattle guards, so I suspect that cattle are brought up here for the summer grazing. This high mesa gradually narrows as we near the pale canyons where the Green River and the Yampa River come together. At the turnouts we can see for miles over more tilted mountains, green plateaus and the cuts of the rivers through the white rock. It feels very familiar, it is a lot like the Big Horn Mountains of WY and MT, and it is gracefully covered by trees and grass for the most part. I imagine that if Monument Valley is the aftermath of some cataclysm, it must have looked like this before everything was blasted away down to the naked red rocks way down below.
It is cloudy with spits of rain and snow, but now and then a shaft of sunlight will give us a spotlight on some distant feature. We come up to a higher park and are suddenly on the edge of a herd of elk, all running away from something, probably us, but they ran across the road in front of us. They are big and ungainly, closer to a moose than a deer, and hold their heads up as they run, sort of like camels. We are very thrilled to see them so close. We turn away to a lookout point and then we come back out onto the main road, they are there again, running in another direction. Further down the road, we run into yet another herd, also running. The truck does make a racket, and we didn’t see anything else they would have been running from. It reminded me of the dream sequence in the movie Never Cry Wolf where the biologist runs naked, hunting caribou with a pack of wolves.
When we get down to the end, we can see the rivers and the canyons all laid out at our feet, everything darkened by the rain except the white sides of the canyons. Echo Park, which lies to our right, was the location of a proposed dam that would have drowned all this lovely country especially the lush parkland as well as the white canyon. There was a pretty stiff fight, and the tree huggers won.
Next day, we head out dropping down to and across Flaming Gorge Dam, which was the alternate dam site to Echo Park. Up the other side and into WY where we hit the flat oil and gas country.
Most towns through here are all oil and gas, the businesses service it, big trailer parks for the pipeline guys, and not very many cattle. We hardly see any vehicles that are not the white pickup trucks of the oil/gas companies. It is dry here and bleak. We stop for the night in Alcova, where dams have created some recreation opportunities, but it is still a kind of forlorn place.
We are on our last day out, and that afternoon we pulled into Hart Ranch. This is as close to home as we have, a familiar place and a beautiful spot for the summer of work.
posted by Thistledown24 at 6:29 AM
2 Comments:
Is everything OK. Haven't heard from you in quite a while.
Stumbled upon your blog a few days ago and I'll be back.
The Bride and I were at DNM the week before last. My first time there. It was great. I also was fascinated by the large lizard petroglyph. Sure was even looking.
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