July 10, 2002: Colorado Trip Day 5
	July 8, 2002: Colorado Trip Day 3
	Return to the Index for Our Colorado Trip

Today will be all about dinosaurs- or at least Dinosaur National Monument. We'll be here in the northeast corner of Utah (and the northwest corner of Colorado) exploring the Monument- which is actually quite large- and our exploration will actually continue into tomorrow.

We did quite a bit here at Dinosaur, and the various drives and things we did can get a bit confusing- particularly looking back on it from ten years later. To help keep things straight in my own mind, and help you see just where in the park we were at a given time, I've taken a large copy of the park map and annotated it with the various drives we made or points of interest that we saw and put it in a scrollable window below. I'll key the various day activities to numbered routes or locations on the map, and you can return here to scroll back and forth to see just where we were:

The Quarry at Dinosaur National Monument (Park Map #1)

The first thing we did this morning was to drive into Dinosaur National Monument, park and get the shuttle bus to the Quarry/Exhibit Building.

The Quarry Building here at Dinosaur National Monument contains what is called the "dinosaur wall." It is the actual steeply-tilted rock layer which contains hundreds of dinosaur fossils. The enclosing rock has been chipped away to reveal the fossil bones intact for public viewing. The rock layer was the original excavation site, but now the actual fossil quarry extends well beyond the confines of the building. Across the service road is one large cliff face where numerous fossils have been uncovered, and further down the park road is the current active quarry..

We were fairly fortunate in the year we chose to visit here, for in July 2006, the Quarry Visitor Center was closed indefinitely due to structural problems that have plagued the building since 1957 as it was built on unstable clay. Plans were drawn up to rehabilitate the building to contain only the rock face and none of the administrative or museum facilities. These were to be moved to a new facility constructed nearby.

The project was stalled for lack of funds until April 2009, when the Park received $13.1 million for the project, the money being part of the Obama administration's $750 billion stimulus plan. The Park Service successfully rebuilt the Quarry Structure and the Quarry was late last year (2011). So, after being closed for over five years, visitors can once again see the world-famous Carnegie Dinosaur Quarry. Paleontologist Earl Douglass started excavations here in 1909, finding numerous fossil specimens which are displayed in museums around the globe. When excavations eventually ended, over 1,500 fossils were left in place on the cliff face so that visitors can view them in the position they were found. The facility also features exhibits on life during the late Jurassic.

It's hard to believe that this area was once lush primeval forest, and that dinosaurs of many types once roamed here, but the fossils prove that this was so. Both plant and animal remains are still visible embedded in the rocks. We spent a fair amount of time here in the Quarry Building, examining the rock face and looking at the exhibits. Although we didn't realize it at the time, there was an overhead steel truss that was bracing the building as a result of the aforementioned problems. You can see it and more of the rock face here.

We spent the better part of an hour here in the Quarry examining the fossils and exhibits. Fred took some good pictures of individual fossils from the rock face matrix, and you can see some of these pictures by clicking on the thumbnail images below:

When we were done at the Quarry Building, we caught a shuttle back to the parking area (there is just no parking available right by the Quarry Building, which is why the shuttles are used). Once we got back in the RAV4, we continued past the Visitor Center on Cub Creek Road to our next two stops.

You can return to today's index or continue with the next section below.

The Green River (Park Map #2)

The next segment of our drive along the main park road was the section that took us along the cliffs above the Green River and to a trailhead for the short hike down to the river itself.

We have taken a number of trips out West so far, and the more we explore this area, the more we learn about how this part of the country works. Take its rivers, for example. Years ago, we visited the Grand Canyon, cut, of course, by the Colorado River as it flows southwest through Colorado, Utah and Arizona. On this trip, we have already passed by the headwaters of this mighty river up in Rocky Mountains National Park (just yesterday). Today, our drive through Dinosaur National Monument will take us along the cliffs above the Green River and we will actually see the place where this river begins- at the confluence of Cub Creek and two other small creeks that flow in from the north and east.

From looking at the map, we can see that the Colorado, which we will see more of in a couple of days when we visit Glenwood Springs, Colorado, joins up with the Green River just south of Canyonlands National Park- a park we have not yet visited but which we expect to visit some summer soon. (As it turned out, it was part of our summer trip in 2003.) So we begin to piece together the geography of the Western United States, bit by bit.

As we drove from the Quarry to the Green River overlook, we were treated to some amazing scenery.

It was a perfect day for a drive like this one- bright sunshine brought out the beauty in the landscape all around us, and it was still early enough in the summer that there was a lot of green wherever there was some water. At the end of this section of the drive, there was a trailhead for a walk down to the banks of the Green River. The hike took just a few minutes, and brought us to the viewpoint that you can see at right.

We took some other good pictures along this part of the drive, and you can have a look at them by clicking on the thumbnail images below:

Fred took a short movie down by the river, and you can watch it with the player below:
You can return to today's index or continue with the next section below.

The Cub Creek Petroglyphs (Park Map #3)

Returning from the hike down to the Green River, we continued on a short ways to the Cub Creek Petroglyph site. One of Fred's primary interests is rock painting and rock carving- pictographs and petroglyphs- and the Cub Creek area presented us with a proliferation of them. We parked the RAV4 and got out to climb the short trails up the rocky cliffsides, and we were rewarded with a large number of excellent examples of the rock art in this area of the country, art that traces back to the Fremont Culture.

Click on the Image Above to View the Slideshow

To view the slideshow, just click on the image at left and I will open the slideshow in a new window. In the slideshow, you can use the little arrows in the lower corners of each image to move from one to the next, and the index numbers in the upper left of each image will tell you where you are in the series. When you are finished looking at the pictures, just close the popup window.

You can return to today's index or continue with the next section below.

Hiking to the Josie Morris Cabin (Park Map #4)

The Josie Morris Cabin is the final destination of the Tilted Rocks Auto Tour, and it is at the end of the Quarry Entrance Road (which turns into the the Tilted Rocks Auto road). You can drive all the way to the cabin itself, or you can stop in a parking area about a mile away and walk through the beautiful mountain scenery to get there. We did the latter.

Josie established her homestead here in 1914. She raised and butchered cattle, pigs, chickens and geese. She canned vegetables from her large garden. Her source of heat for her cabin was wood, her water came from a spring, and light from an oil lamp. Josie lived a 19th century lifestyle well into the 20th century. For Josie, the benefits of isolation she experienced living here were solitude and the beauty.

The risk of such isolation was a mortal accident. In 1964 Josie suffered a broken hip while feeding her horse on frozen, slippery ground. Shortly after Josie's accident she died at the age of 90. When we got to the cabin and corral, we found it a great location to rest under the many different variety of large trees. We did explore two more short hiking trails in the area; both led to box canyons that Josie used as natural corrals for her pigs and cattle. Click on the thumbnails below to see three pictures that we took in these box canyons:

You can return to today's index or continue with the next section below.

Hiking the Jones Hole Trail (Park Map #5)

Our last hike of the day would be the Jones Hole hike which is on the north side of the Green River. To get there, we had to retrace our route to the park entrance, and then take a side road that wound around through the hills north of the Green River. This brought us to the entrance for the Jones Hole Fish Hatchery and the trailhead for the hike.

It took longer to get to the trailhead than we thought, and so we were not at all sure that we would be able to hike the entire eight miles down to the Green River and back before it got dark, and we wanted to leave some light to be able to set up the tent in the campground near Vernal that we had picked out for the night. But we at least wanted to get to the well-known petroglyphs at Deluge Shelter and, if possible, take a side trail up Ely Creek- a hike we'd read was well worth the time. So we started off on the hike about three or so, planning to turn around no later than five.

I've put a copy of the Jones Hole Trail Map at left and marked on it the approximate route that we followed. It would have been nice to get all the way to the Green River, but it was more prudent not to be hiking in the dark.

Jones Hole is the name given to a 2,000‑foot‑deep gorge that runs along the border between Utah and Colorado in Dinosaur National Monument. Jones Hole Creek, in the bottom of the gorge, is fed from a number of small springs at the head of the canyon and along its sides. The trail begins just below the first spring, at the Jones Hole Fish Hatchery, and winds pleasantly along the creek for about four miles to join the Green River in Whirlpool Canyon. The creek bed is a lush green oasis surrounded by the semiarid land of Dinosaur National Monument. At times the trail climbs away from the water into the sagebrush and pinion-juniper forest that surrounds it, but mostly it stays very close to the canyon floor where boxelders, cottonwoods, and other water-hungry trees prevail.

The creek is also an important source of water for the monument’s wildlife, and it is not uncommon to see deer-especially in the early hours of the day. We saw quite a few of them, and if you'll click on the thumbnails below you can see the pictures we took of them:

From the visitors parking area of Jones Hole Fish Hatchery we walked downstream for a few hundred feet, past the fish tanks, to the southern end of the complex. Here we found the sign on the east side of the creek marking the trailhead. The trail stays on the same side of the creek for just over a mile. For most of the way the path is very near the water, although at one point it leaves the creek to meander briefly through the pinion-juniper forest on the left bank. The vegetation changes dramatically just a short distance from the water's edge. Click on the thumbnail images below to see some of the pictures we took along the first part of the hike:

The first hour of the hike was really pleasant. Down by the creek it was noticeably cooler than even a hundred feet away from it, and it always seems that the most pleasant hikes are the ones near water.

Deer Along Jones Creek

The water in the creek was fast-running and made a lot of noise, which was great. And we continued to spot wildlife at or near the river. Perhaps you can easily spot the two deer in the picture at right.

Below are thumbnails for more of the pictures we took along this part of the hike; these will give you an excellent idea of what the canyon was like. Just click on the thumbnails to view the full-size pictures:

After a bit over an hour, we came to our first destination- the Deluge Shelter petroglyphs.

After a half-hour walk the trail crosses a small footbridge, giving hikers the opportunity to see two interesting archeological sites on the west bank. Excavations at the Deluge Shelter site in 1965-67 showed that Jones Hole has been occupied intermittently by at least fifteen separate Indian cultures over the past 7000 years. The cultural layers exposed by the excavation proved to be unusually well defined, and the information gained has contributed significantly to the puzzle of America's prehistoric past.

Both of the Jones Hole archeological sites contain well preserved examples of prehistoric Indian rock art, which, in view of the many hikers that use the trail, are remarkably unvandalized.

We took quite a few pictures of the ancient rock art, and if you will click on the thumbnails below, you can have a look at some of them:

Once we passed both of the archaeological sites, we hiked for another forty minutes or so to arrive at the confluence of Ely Creek and Jones Hole Creek, and we took a short side trip up Ely Creek. It flows out of an area known as the Labyrinths, a rugged maze of backcountry canyons, only about a mile northwest of the confluence.

We followed Ely Creek to the west for less than an eighth of a mile and came to a very pretty little waterfall (click on the leftmost thumbnail of the group at left to see it), and above it, there was another series of little waterfalls as Ely Creek flowed across a multi-leveled section of rock.

We took a couple more pictures here, looking down on each other from the upper rock levels; click on the thumbnails at left to see these pictures.

We noticed a change in the geological structure of Jones Hole as we passed Ely Creek. Above this point the canyon walls were made of sandstone (which we later found out was the Weber Sandstone formation), but below Ely Creek the canyon floor at least entered what appeared to be a different formation of limestone and shale. As it turned out, this 200-million-year-old sedimentary formation bears testimony to the existence of an ancient sea that once covered the area, and fossil remains of the sea’s inhabitants can often be found in the limestone.

About twenty minutes past Ely Creek, we reluctantly turned around to head back; going all the way to Green River would have added another ninety minutes to our overall hike time, and we thought that would be cutting it too close. On the way back to the parking area, we took some additional pictures of the trail and the canyons in the fading afternoon light. You can have a look at these by clicking on the thumbnails below:

We got back to the parking area about seven, and we still had an hour or so of light left to head over to Jensen, Utah and the campground on the Green River where we would stay for the night.

You can return to today's index or use the links below to continue to another photo album page.

	July 10, 2002: Colorado Trip Day 5
	July 8, 2002: Colorado Trip Day 3
	Return to the Index for Our Colorado Trip