July 13, 2013 Day four

Woke up early in Arches, with the sun shining brightly on the rocks.  Lovely!  Such different looks depending upon the time of day.

About an hour drive to Canyonlands National Park. We keep seeing t-shirts announcing “Utah Rocks!”  They are really correct.  The rocks in Utah are amazing in so many different ways.

 Canyonlands is a less visited cousin to Arches.  It is at the confluence of two great rivers, The Colorado and The Green River.  The canyons dug by these rivers   are not as deep as the Grand Canyon, but are very large scale.  The environment even today seems so intimidating.  This was one of the last mapped areas of the U.S. and we can understand why. 

And interesting fact about the park was that for a while in the 1950’s the U.S. government encouraged people to do uranium mining in the canyons.  They did this by putting in roads leading up to the canyons and even down in the canyons.  Although many tried to do the mining there, not much uranium was ever found here and after a few years they gave up.  As long as the roads were already in place and it was a very beautiful area, congress agreed to make it a National Park.  Thank you uranium.

We learned this story by attending a ranger talk at the edge of a great lookout point.  So may of the national parks have convoluted stories about how they came to be protected areas.  Many of them include having one or more champions who devoted their lives to protecting a wilderness area.  We bid farewell to the canyons, because we were now off on a six-hour drive to northern Utah to get to yet another National Monument, Dinosaur National Monument.

You had to really want to get to this place; we followed a very local-type road through the mountains and came out in Dinosaur CO.  From there we crossed back in to Utah and reached the site that in 1909 Earl Douglas found one of the riches deposits of dinosaur fossils ever found.  He first found six dinosaur tails, and then followed them down into the rock and found 300 different dinosaurs in one slab of rock.  He was able to excavate much of the site and send the bones back to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh or to the Smithsonian.    When Andrew Carnegie died in the 1920’s and funding dried up, Douglas put forth an idea to preserve the remainder of the slab with the dinosaur bones intact, projected under a building for the public to see.  This was done in the mid-20^th century, building a building right around the slab.  Unfortunately, they didn’t take into consideration the land and shifting of the earth there and the building cracked and eventually had to be taken down.  It was replaced two years ago with a state of the art building displaying these bones.

You can’t drive directly to the Quarry site, but are taken there but tram.  We spent time marveling at the large array of fossils captured in rock.  We were told even though this was amazing, it was only 25% of what we originally found.

One of the things that was really fun was that there was a section of the wall that you could touch the bones.  You were actually able to touch the really fossilized bones, but not the fake casts.  Those were apparently more fragile and a visitor broke one of those the first week the new display was open.

A nice surprise in our driving around the site was several rocks that ancient people had decorated with exquisite petroglyphs.  We have seen rock art in many places, but especially enjoyed seeing lizards and a genuine kokopelli, flute player. These were carved into the rock somewhere around 1000 years ago.

We had a campsite near the Green River and enjoyed the evening breezes, part of a ranger campfire talk where he shared a couple of stories about the moon, and then caught up on some blog writing while we kept an eye on the storm clouds rolling in.  It is indeed challenging to fit in writing about all of the glorious sites, look through our hundreds of photos for a typical day, and then find Internet connection to get them all uploaded.  Ah the trials of the modern traveler!

"Once away, we are less restrained. We don't withhold. We pursue our curiosity, freely and openly. We take the time to be curious. We take the time to probe. We let go of tried and true ways. We take the time to improvise, to sample, to taste."
--Steve Zikman