You want dinosaurs - we got dinosaurs!

Fruita, CO to Jensen, UT (more sightseeing!)

June 15 - 22, 2016

It's a beautiful drive from Fruita to Jensen as you cross over the Bookcliff Mountains at Douglas Pass - about 8,300 feet.  It was so different from anything we'd seen for awhile - more like Washington State with lots of green.

As we approached the town of Dinosaur, CO we noticed a group of horses very close to the road and definitely not behind any fences.  We've seen free range cattle before but never free range horses.  We thought they had probably broken through a fence and gotten loose so we stopped at the city office to report the situation.  The clerk on duty asked me what color some of the horses were and when I told her she said they were wild horses that had been coming down close to town for awhile.  I sure wished we had gotten a picture of them but when you are driving a motorhome towing a car - turning around is not something you do lightly.  I have to say they looked pretty healthy.  The grass they were grazing on was certainly lush and probably the reason they come down to town.

We arrived in Jensen fairly early so once we had set up the motorhome we headed directly to Dinosaur National Monument.  It was nothing short of amazing.  A scientist from the Carnagy Museum in Pittsburg came out to this area in 1908 to look for dinosaur bones under the direction of Andrew Carnagy himself who wanted a skeleton for his museum.  It didn't take them long to find an entire skeleton, much less hundreds of bones.  The site was worked for about 15 years and the bones they discovered were taken to Pittsburg.  Long story short - the site was made into a National Monument and a building constructed over the quarry hill, with the hill acting as one side of the building.  Inside you can see thousands of bones laying there, encased in rock as they have been for millions of years. It truly is quite a sight.

The building was built right into the excavation hill.

This is the excavation site - now an integral part of the building itself.

The far end of the building.  You can view the site from two levels directly across from the bones.

This is what the surrounding area looks like.
Who knows what might be hidden beneath them!

Skull and backbone.

Hundreds of bones to see.

The bones are much easier to see than these pictures would indicate.

Mighty big humerus. It's essentially as tall as Laura!

It's really hard to imagine these huge reptiles roaming the earth.

Something tells me these guys could run real fast.

We ended up unexpectedly staying in Jensen for a week after we found out we couldn't get into the KOA campground in Salt Lake because of a big conference.  We used the time to try to get our research organized.

Since we had extra time we took a side trip out of Vernal, UT which is about 15 miles to the west. The brochure indicated we could see the most easily accessible petroglyphs anywhere.  "Easily accessible" being music to our ears - we decided to check them out.  We struggled to find the road out of Vernal but we were finally on our way.  After a few wrong moves we finally arrived at the parking lot which was completely circled by antlers. Awesome!

It was a hot, hot, hot day so we took some cold bottled ice tea with us.  We signed in as directed and paid a "donation" of $5 (also as directed).  We started toward the face of the cliff and found two signs - one labeled "trail" and the other "main trail".  Obviously the "main trail" is the one to take so we started out?

I think now I should have seen these skulls as a subtle warning sign.

Easily accessible is a term that must be interpreted by the reader and we took the writer's word for it. It didn't indicate that it was wheel chair accessible but by the same token it didn't indicate that there was any climbing or scrambling required.  Of course most people who visit this site are young and fit or maybe even middle age to old and fit.  Fit being the operative word.  Did I mention it was hot, hot, hot!  I should also mention that the wall of the cliff faced due south!

We scrambled up the "main trail" as best we could, each holding our ice tea bottle in our hand, and arrived at the face of the cliff sweating like pigs.

At the time we felt like we were climbing a mountain but
the trail doesn't look so bad from this picture does it?

As you can see - we really weren't that far up from the valley floor!
In actuality it took us less than 10 minutes to reach the base of the cliff.

Here I am examining the wall.

We were rewarded for our efforts with petroglyphs.  You have to scramble along the edge, around boulders, rocks and brush to view them

Hopefully you can see the animal in this picture.

We're not sure what these are but they look like a rendition of two tombstones from here.
Maybe that's just because we're genealogists.

I'm not sure this is original Native work.  There is clearly
stuff along this cliff that has been done in more recent times.
This probably falls into that category.

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In the midst of all this Laura got something in her eye that sort of incapacitated her a bit. She wanted to go back the way we came but I suggested we keep going, feeling sure the trail would lead us back down.  I'm sure some of you probably know that tea is a diuretic.  It is now causing more problems that it was curing in terms of hydration.  Memo for file:  only take water on a hike - most especially - DON'T TAKE TEA!!!  OK - so now we're not only dehydrated but our bladders are full or at least mine was. Laura was determined to go back the way we came and I'm convinced we should go forward but none of this matters because I'm feeling completely disabled by the heat.  There wasn't much shade up there but I was sitting under what little there was.  Once rested I would move on to the next shady spot but the bladder issue is becoming acute.  With no one around I took care of business. Meanwhile we are calling to one another to make sure the other is OK.  Suddenly Laura comes back and joins me to continue in the direction I'm going and hopefully down to the bottom. Feeling weak and a bit light headed I could only go a very short distance before I had to rest. Except for the eye issue Laura was doing better so she went on ahead, got to the bottom then realized I had the car keys! So she came back up, got the keys and went to the car for water which she brought back up to me.  It took about 45 minutes to an hour before I got to the bottom and was sitting under some shade.  And as a final note - the trail we came down on was the one we initially saw marked "trail" and it was considerably easier to negotiate than the "main trail" we went up.  To bad we hadn't gone that direction in the first place!