Last weekend we visited Dinosaur National Monument in eastern Utah. I took Friday off from work. The kids and I got up early to put gas in our red Windstar, get the oil changed at Jiffy Lube, and borrow a few sleeping bags from Grandma and Grandpa’s house. W and L had fun just getting ready for the trip, especially at Jiffy Lube, where they got free red popsicles.
We zoomed away from home at at 11:00 a.m., beginning a 3 1/2 hour tour that would take us to Vernal. It was a long way, but the kids did very well (we only heard "are we there yet" a few dozen times). W and L started to get more and more excited as we neared the monument, as life-sized dinosaur statutes began to appear along the road side to advertise motels and gift shops.
For my part of the drive, I was mesmerized by the beauty of the small, high mountain desert towns we sauntered through. I longed to stop and explore the 1940's era Main Streets and eat at the drug stores and soda fountains that made them up. My marvel blazoned an overnight in one of the sleepy brick inns, drifting off to sleep after a long red sunset and a movie at a drive-in movie theater nestled amongst the crimson sandstone buttes.
I took all of this in as we meandered toward Vernal. As we went, we consumed heavy amounts of licorice, Cheez-its, and peanut butter M&M's. I had nearly lethal levels of peanut butter in my body by the time we got to Vernal. It was a fun drive.
We arrived at the park at 3:00 p.m., and solemnly passed a $10 bill to the lady ranger at the gate for the right to take part in the prehistoric peep show. We briefly made use of the Visitor's Center and its impressively clean and well-appointed restrooms, and then climbed the hill to the Quarry.
My family paid a visit to Dinosaur National Monument when I was about 8 years old, and the one vivid image I have retained from that trip is from the Quarry. The Quarry is a rock face enclosed by a building whose primary purpose is to facilitate observation of the dinosaur bones in the rock. From outside the building it is easy to see from the vertical orientation of the sedimentary layers that this particular rock was, on some violent day in history, rammed from the depths to the surface of Earth by some primeval force many orders of magnitude more powerful than the most terrible man-made explosives.
This enormous mineral slab, which we were told once formed part of a river bed in the ancient world, collected the fragments of many dinosaurs of the Morrison era, mostly Sauropods (think Brontosaurus), who mostly died of natural causes at the river's edge. Their corpses were overlaid by sand and soil, encasing and preserving them until they were driven to the surface again, to be discovered in 1909 by paleontologist Earl Douglass, who happened upon the tailbones of an Allosaurus protruding in perfect formation from the top of this impressive mound.
The image of the Quarry that is burned into my memory is actually of a different building which used to enclose the Quarry but, because of shifting soils, eventually became unstable and was torn down. I can see in my mind's eye the excavators crawling up the rock face like marionettes covered in ropes, painstakingly chiseling away at the stone wrappers that had protected these bones for 150 million years.
They stopped taking bones out of the Quarry in the 1990's. Now they have left the remaining bones in relief for public observation. It was amazing to see the, and think of what the world was when these beasts were alive.
(Side Note: I took all the photos in this post with Instagram. It partially hides the fact that I'm a terrible photographer taking pictures with a cell phone camera.)
While we looked at the dinosaur bones, one of the rangers, Ranger Celia, was giving tours of the facility and reviewing its history. J and I started to notice that L was following her around like an obedient puppy. When she would walk ahead of him with the other grown-ups, L would run after her and yell "Wait, I'm coming!" After we left the Quarry, L told us, "Ranger Celia is my girlfriend." He's 3.
When we left the Quarry it was raining. Not a good sign since we had been planning to camp and break in the tent J and I got from the brotherhood for our wedding and which had never yet seen the light of day. We briefly considered driving back to Vernal and getting a hotel room, but quickly resolved that we had come to camp, we were going to camp, and if nothing else we would make some memories on this trip.
We jetted down to the Green River campground, all the while watching the sky and hoping for a break in the clouds. We had to be a little patient, but our break finally came and everything dried off. The kids were ecstatic to be on a real camping trip. I got the tent set up while J got the fire going and cooked the savory foil dinners she had assembled the night before.
After we finished dinner, we roasted marshmallows and made Smores with little chocolate covered shortbread cookies.
Even though it was their first time sleeping in a tent, the kids did well. Before bed we took a walk down to the river bank to watch the cliff swallows cherry pick bugs from the surface of the Green River. On the way back we discovered mutant centipedes (didn't get a picture of those unfortunately), deer droppings (Winnie collected a few of them thinking they were rocks) and even a little toad quivering in the cheat grass. Things were peaceful.
In the morning we broke camp and drove through the park. We saw wild turkeys, rabbits, lizards, and lots of petroglyphs chiseled into the sandstone. I got plenty of pictures.
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We finally ended up at the Josie Bassett homestead. Josie was a remarkable woman, who when she was divorced in the late 1910's decided to find a new life. At age 40 she built a simple log cabin, some animal pens and fences, and there she lived for the next 50 years.
We got to walk through her log cabin home. It was very simple, just logs, mud and pitch. There was a stone fireplace in the middle which must have cost her pains to put in. She had wallpapered the log walls once, and bits of the newspaper the underlay the wallpaper still clung to the walls. I was fascinated to read the little bits of newspaper that were still legible, and to think of all the great and ostensibly important things that had transpired in the world while this spunky lady toiled alone in the wilderness, each day just like the last.
We ended our trip with one last visit to the Quarry, and then made our way home. I hope to build many more memories like this in the coming years with J, W, and L~
