Dinosaur National Monument Road Trip
Most photos by Steve Blyskal
Building photos from www.nps.gov/dino/index.htm
My husband Steve Blyskal and I go to Colorado often but once in a while, we look for something different. You know, you get tired of snow-capped mountains and spruce trees… not really! But the northwest corner of Colorado is also interesting with its canyons, rivers, and pinon trees.
A little information about the Monument:
• Back in 1909, Earl Douglas of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh went west to
search for dinosaur fossils for the museum. He discovered the first fossils on a sandstone ridge.
• Next, he opened a quarry to excavate fossils, and sent them to the Carnegie Museum.
• In 1915, President Wilson designated the 80 acres of quarry as a National Monument
• In 1938, President Roosevelt designated an additional 200,000 + acres to the Monument, protecting the canyons of the Yampa and Green Rivers.
• In the 1950s, early environmental activists fought successfully to prevent a dam from being built on the Green River which would have flooded the canyons in the Monument. Congress eventually passed a law forbidding the destruction of National Parks and Monuments by dams and other construction.
• The Quarry Exhibit Hall opened to the public to show dinosaur fossils as found. The Exhibit Hall re-opened in 2011 after some foundation problems were remediated.
• The animals were fossilized after being deposited on a river point bar after a flood, leaving the bones jumbled together.
Commonly found fossils are those of Allosaurus (Jurassic) Deinonychus, a relative of Velociraptor, Stegosaurus, Apatosaurus and Diplodicus.
For a list of dinosaurs found at the Monument, see https://www.nps.gov/dino/learn/nature/dinosaurs-of-dinosaur.htm
The exposed rocks of Dinosaur National Monument are sedimentary and range in age from Precambrian (about 1,100 million years ago) to Miocene (about 25 to 10 million year ago), according to the same NPS reference above. Petroglyphs have been analyzed and are believed to have been made 1000 years ago by the Fremont people. Using sharp tools, they removed the desert varnish on the rock surface to reveal the light-colored sandstone beneath.
Many adventures are in store for the visitor to Dinosaur National Monument, archaeological, geological, scenic and river rafting.
Now for the funny part: on our way back to Edwards, my sister called and said that I-70 was closed due to a landslide. We decided to spend the night in Meeker, Colorado and then drive back over the Flat Tops. That’s a whole other adventure!