Dinosaur National Monument

We drove from Colorado National Monument to Dinosaur National Monument (which straddles Colorado and Utah), arriving in the evening at Green River Campground (in a cottonwood grove on the river).  Unfortunately, a cottonwood had fallen on an unoccupied tent a couple weeks earlier and the NPS had closed about half the campsites due to the problem trees.  We had to take two sites that weren't really in the shade, though they got shady as the sun went behind a hill.  It was really hot.  The next day we got up early to go to the









quarry.  Carnegie, in competition with Rockefeller, wanted a bigger dinosaur for his museum.  He sent a paleontologist out to look for bones and he finally found a spinal column sticking out of the rocks in 1905.  After nine years of excavation (mainly by hand), he sent 700 tons of dinosaur bones back to Carnegie's museum in Pittsburgh.  He left many bones partially excavated in the quarry, which is now covered and you can touch the bones and talk with rangers.  It's really fascinating.  These two photos show some of the bones in the quarry.


We also took the Tilted Rocks Road (11 miles) within the park.  This view is of the Green River (which is running red from run-off from a recent rain) and Split Mountain (white) in the background.  The Green River cut through Split Mountain because it had first started cutting through softer rock above Split Mountain and then was committed to its course (the same as the Gunnison River in the Black Canyon).





There is lots of evidence of Fremont man pictographs in the valley.  These were on the way to a ranch and this wall of lizards (there are about nine in total) was on the way.  The lizard in the center is about 6' long.









In the same area is this pictograph of Kokopeli (the god of fertility).  He would come in the spring to fertilize the crops and at the same time he would fertilize all the women.















At the end of the road was the ranch of a single woman who had moved there at the age of 39.  She lived until she was 89 and died in 1964.  She never had electricity, planted a huge garden, canned produce, allegedly engaged in some cattle rustling, collected water from a spring (Wyoming water law provided that if a spring fed a stream on the surface and a down-river user had rights to it, the person on whose property the spring was located couldn't use the water) and corralled her horses and cattle in this box canyon.  She found a loophole in the Wyoming water law and dug small retaining dams and made sure the spring water never got to the surface so she could use it.  This box canyon's entrance was very narrow and still had the pole fence at its open end.  It is always in the shadow.