Dinosaur Country

At the midpoint of the road between Steamboat Springs and Salt Lake City is Vernal, Utah, which is the gateway to the Dinosaur National Monument.  We stayed at the Dinosaurland KOA, which was fairly nice, but that may have been the narrowest campsite at which we've ever parked our motorhome. 

Utah is the world's most important site of dinosaur bones from the Jurassic geologic period.  Nancy and I visited the Utah Field House of Natural History (a dinosaur museum) in downtown Vernal, which reminded us of the amazingly brief time we humans have been on the scene (between 100,000 and 200,000 years) compared to the reign of the dinosaurs (around 135 million years) and especially compared to the age of the Earth (about 4.5 billion years).  There were dinosaur bones and full size models and all sorts of exhibits explaining the collection of specimens, the kinds of dinosaurs common to the area, and other fun dinosaur facts.

My interest in dinosaurs is greater than Nancy's, so I took a solo trip to Dinosaur National Monument, about 30 miles away.  A tram carried me and the other visitors to the Quarry Exhibit Hall, which houses a quarry wall about 150 feet long still containing a huge number of visible dinosaur bones.  I suppose that the scientists had found so many bones there that leaving some for tourists to see was no hardship.

Just down the road from the Exhibit Hall I took a hiking trail, about two miles total in length, where there were embedded in the rock face a few dinosaur bones visible to an observant eye.  The weather was quite hot.  A sign recommended that you carry a quart of water with you and notify someone of your hiking plans, but the path wasn't really long enough to get a prime specimen like myself in trouble.