Dinosaur Stew

This is a continuation of my trip to Colorado and Utah from last October. This particular day was mostly a travel day, getting myself from Grand Junction, Colorado, over to Salt Lake City, Utah where I would spend several days. When I worked out the itinerary of this trip, I realized that I was close enough to Dinosaur National Monument that it wouldn't make sense not to stop and at least whet my appetite on the fossils there, and so this particular spot also made the list of must sees. And as always, I usually bite off more than I can chew when I'm on trips like this, but it just gives me an excuse to come back at a later time.

I think if I were to do this monument up right, I'd spend several days here, probably camping. The monument has lots to offer including whitewater rafting, something that I'm not into, but I do know other people are and so I've mentioned it. For me, I was most interested in seeing the quarry of dinosaur fossils. I did not come away disappointed.

The park straddles the Utah/Colorado border and so is sort of broken up into two different unique areas. Since the quarry where the dinosaur bones can be seen close up is in the Utah side, I chose to head there. As I approached the monument border, I noticed a geocache outside the park boundary, so I decided to stop and find that one. It's very rare to find a physical geocache inside a national park area, because the National Park Service views it as litter. There are a couple of exceptions as there are several hidden in Petrified Forest National Park but they are maintained by a ranger in the park. Most geocaches you'll see in national park area would be either earth caches (geology based) or virtual caches which I've written about previously. In this case, the quarry area of the park had one of each that I was interested in finding.

I spent a good amount of time in the quarry area taking in all there was to see. The earth cache I working on asked me to examine the fossils along the wall of the quarry. It's estimated there are over 1500 fossils still embedded in the wall. I talked with a ranger and he told me that it's really more of a Dinosaur stew than anything else. The herbivores would be killed by the carnivores and the bones would be left after the carnivores had their fill. Eventually, the bones would be carried downstream where they were caught in this area by a large sand bar. Over time the bones were buried and eventually fossilized, hence the jumble of different kinds of dinosaurs all in the same area. 

The two bones you're looking at in the second photo are the femurs of a diplodocus and an apatosaurus (what we would call the brontosaurus back in the day). The photos don't really tell the tale, but both of those bones are about 6 feet in length and 18 inches in diameter.

The third photo gives more of a scale size to it. One of the tourist there was from Germany who was slightly taller than me, probably close to 6 feet tall. I asked him if he would stand near the fossil so I could get a size comparison, which he obviously obliged. This particular dinosaur, a camarasaurus, was the most common fossil found in the quarry area. This was one of the most complete camarasaurus ever found anywhere. The camarasaurus is part of the long necked dinosaurs commonly referred to as sauropods.

After taking in the quarry and finishing up the earthcache, I decided to drive further down the road to a virtual cache. I did a small hike out there to get what I needed to get and then headed back to the car and the exit so I could get to Salt Lake City in a timely fashion. I caught a little bit of rain on the drive there, but that was about all of the inclement weather that I got on this particular trip. All in all, I was very glad I stopped as this was one of those "new" places that I promised myself that I wasn't going to miss if I was in the area. It's not new anymore, but that doesn't mean I won't come back again sometime in the future.

Badlands

Back in the 60s, my dad's best friend took a sabbatical from teaching to pursue an advanced degree. He ended up getting his degree from a university in Wisconsin and they ended up taking the entire family back for the year. When they returned his son, my friend had new decal stickers, one of which was from Badlands National Monument. Being the map nerd that I am, I was intrigued and looked it up and thought at some time in the future, it would be interesting to visit the park. Since that time, Congress has upped the status of the monument and now it's a national park located east of Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota.

As we approached Badlands National Park, we kept seeing advertisements for Wall Drug, which is a major tourist trap just north of the park. Yeah, we stopped there, only to look around, find a tee-shirt of the place, mainly because I like advertising weirdly different stuff I've visited and then headed south out of town into the park. The park is a geologic wonderland of erosion and there were pullouts along the road with many interpretive signs. We ended up stopping at several, including one where there was a herd of young bighorn sheep. The sheep are very hard to see mainly because they blend in so well with the browns of the badlands, which is why there are no photos of them here.

At another turnout, we stopped and took a walking tour of an interpretive loop trail while we gathered answers for an earth cache based upon fossils. The area is rich in fossil life and we weren't disappointed, getting to see several different varieties of fossils in the rock layers. What was also outstanding about the day was the weather. As you can see from the photos, we ended up driving through the beginnings of a large series of thunderstorms as we made our way across southern South Dakota that day. The first storm started while we were on our way out of the visitors center at the east end of the park heading back to the Interstate (third photo). The clouds made for some gorgeous photo opportunities. And, as always, I could have spent more time there, but we had an itinerary to keep to and were actually attending a geocaching event in South Dakota later that evening (who goes to a geocaching event several thousand miles from home?).

I'm sure I'll get back to the area in the future and the plan will be to camp a couple of nights there to fully enjoy the park. We got an appetizer of the park that day, be enough that made us both want to come back.

On our way back out to the Interstate, we got pelted with rain, as we had earlier the day before coming from Wind Cave National Park. This time, the storm got a little bit more severe as we drove across the South Dakota prairie. We had the radio on and we kept getting the weather alerts, those alerts that we rarely get in Southern California because we don't get any kind of severe weather, but scares the bejesus out you when they come on. These were coming every fifteen minutes detailing thunderstorms and worse, hail storms, with hail the size of ping pong balls.  Later, the size of the hail stones were "upgraded" to golfball size hail. Fortunately, they also listed counties where this was likely to happen and my youngest was tracking it using the atlas and checking out where the counties were and all of the major alerts were south of the Interstate, so we missed the hail, but did get an entertaining thunder and lightning storm accompanied by very heavy rain. Fortunately, the geocaching event was under a covered shelter in a park, so we stayed high and dry for the entire event except when we were walking to and from our car. 

I've attended five geocaching events out of state and every one has been very enjoyable. We share a common hobby and it's always fun to swap stories with the local geocachers. We'd had problems with a cache near our motel and I mentioned it to one of the cachers there and he pointed me to another cacher who was the owner. The owner of the cache met up with us back at his cache after the event and we discovered that the cache was indeed missing, so he replaced it with another one he'd had in his car. He had been intending on giving it to us, but instead, gave us a couple others that he had made using his 3D printer. And so I have a cache container that looks like an oak acorn and another one that looks like a pine cone. They are my souvenirs from South Dakota geocaching.

The next day we left South Dakota behind and headed into Minnesota and Iowa, spending the next night in northern Iowa in Mason City.