Road Trip 2019 - Day 2 - Dinosaurs
/I started writing about our recent road trip here. A lot has happened since then, but I’m back to work on this trip.
After seeing Matt in Winnemucca we drove into the dark. We planned to stop at a rest stop to sleep but kept going until we knew we were going to run out of choices.
There is a pull-off with an outhouse on the east side of Nevada getting close to Utah. There were some semis parked there, a big gravel pile and a lot of road construction equipment behind a fence. We stopped there and ate the cold pizza that Dan had made the night before. We set up our sleeping bags on the plywood platform in the back of the truck and went to bed. This photo was taken about 5:30 after the construction crew started to show up. We got in the truck and headed out.
Driving into Utah. There are a lot of “drive-by” photos in this post.
This was taken at the eastern edge of the salt flats. The train in the foreground gives scale to that massive pile of salt at one of the salt plants along I-80.
I was so glad to get a new phone before this trip. The battery in the old one was shot and some of the features just didn’t work anymore. I like using my big camera but this iPhone camera is pretty amazing. Our destination was Colorado. Directions from our house are simple. Turn right from our driveway, right on Dixon Avenue, right onto I-80, and when you get to Cheyenne, Wyoming turn right again. We looked at the map though and saw that we could go to Dinosaur National Monument by taking a different route out of Salt Lake City and heading toward Vernal, so that what we did.
There is a theme as you get closer to the monument.
Most of these are in Vernal, Utah.
Someone had fun designing this one.
The next closest town to the Monument.
This one has a sort of Zombi look to it.
The monument was back in those dry mountains. This photo shows the contrast between water and no-water. The Green River runs through here and provides irrigation water.
This is the western entrance to Dinosaur National Monument, called the Quarry.
The on-line info makes it clear that if you want to see dinosaur bones this is where to go. From the other entrance, several miles away in Colorado you can enter the beautiful landscape but you won’t see dinosaur bones.
In front of the Visitor Center.
The featured attraction at this location is the Quarry Exhibit Hall where there are over 1500 fossils embedded in the rock.
This schematic shows the contrast of the protected area that remains and what is now gone. The brochure says that many dinosaurs died along a river during a drought, and when the rains returned floodwaters carried the bones of over 500 of them to this spot. Bones were discovered in 1909 by Earl Douglass, Carnegie Paleontologist, and in the next several years 700,000 tons of material were sent east to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. In 1915 Dinosaur National Monument was established. In 1938 Franklin Roosevelt expanded the monument from the original 80 acres to over 200,000 acres.
This made me think about the what we have read at each of the places we have been—most recently thinking about the Redwoods in Humboldt County—in each of these places there was someone with the foresight and passion to protect and preserve land or trees or a mountain just for the sake of its beauty or uniqueness. If not for that these places would be gone or irrevocably changed by now. I’m afraid of the destruction and loss of our remaining wildlands that could be caused by thoughtless, selfish politicians of our current era, including some who are in positions that should be protecting our environment. Rant over for now.
I thought this was an interesting representation of scale.
Here is another.
You can see the bones from two levels in the Exhibition Hall.
I’m not a dinosaur fanatic but this exhibit was fascinating and very well done.
After leaving the Dinosaur Quarry we set off to see some of the rest of this part of the monument. We planned to camp here and then go see the Colorado side the next day. That will be Part 2 of Day 2.
