2020 Road Trip Journal: Dinosaurs and Dentists

Hi there— a lot to cover today, it’s a dual entry completing yesterday’s journal plus today’s.

Day Eight: June 17

The weather surprised me again, but this time pleasantly. When I drove around for my first look at Dinosaur National Monument yesterday, the temperature was in the high 80s, and under the desert sun that felt a lot hotter than it should have (back in Dallas, the high 80s would have seemed pleasantly cool this time of year). Combined with all the warnings posted at trailheads about desert hiking, I was prepared for a hot time of it on my hikes today, and I planned an extra-early start to avoid the midday heat. But a front must have blown through overnight. When I got started it was downright chilly, and I thought history was about to repeat itself after my hiking day at Rocky Mountain. But it quickly warmed up to a very nice hiking temperature, hovering around the high 60s to around 70 all day.

I planned three short hikes today, each a 2 mile round trip for a total of 6 miles for the day (it turned out to be closer to 7, the hikes were 2 miles and some change). The first was the “Fossil Discovery Trail” which started from the closed Visitor Center. It’s the only trail that leads to dinosaur fossils, and with the visitor centers and museum closed, the only place to see fossils in the park, so it was the first thing on my list!

Before getting to the fossils, the trail leads past a petroglyph site. There are a number of these throughout the park, roughly a thousand years old— contemporary with the Ancestral Puebloan people, though this was a different culture, called the Fremont People by archaeologists.

All of the petroglyphs in the area have been marred by modern visitors scrawling their names or initials. You can see on the picture above left that some idiot has scratched his initials NT partly over the image itself! It’s baffling to me that people seem to think this is a thing to do.

	Of course the real point of the trail is when it reaches a cliff face of Jurassic-age rock with dinosaur bones still embedded in it. Here are a row of vertebrae, the spine of some large dinosaur— fairly high up the cliff.
And here’s a leg bone, of around half of one, showing the joint on the right, and broken off at the shaft on the left. Look close— it was easier to see in person than in the photograph.
	This one was in reach, and while warning against trying to remove it, the park service info display invited visitors to touch it. Probably the only chance I’ll have to touch a real dinosaur fossil of this size, still in situ!

My second hike was the “Desert Voices” trail, one of two loop trails in the same area with educational exhibits along the way. The other “Sound of Silence” was a couple of miles longer and was marked as very strenuous, climbing steeply over rock outcroppings and ridges, so I went with the easier one to keep my day on schedule (and not because I’m completely out of shape, no sir). Both trails highlight the geology and ecosystems of this section of the national monument.

This side of the park is dominated by Split Mountain, so named because the Green River splits it in two with a canyon right down the middle. Like a lot of the central and western US, this area was covered by an inland sea that came and went and came again, leaving different layers of sediment of different hardness, composition, and color. It was dry land (though marshy) during the Jurassic period, leaving behind the sediment layer with dinosaur fossils.
Split Mountain was created when tectonic forces pushed the layers up until a dome shape, which erosion then carved up into dynamic shapes. All the layers visible in the rocks here are tilted to the same angle, upward toward the top of the dome (or what would be the top if the Green River hadn’t carved a canyon through it). This erosion is what exposed the fossil beds for discovery in the 1800s.

The tilted layers are so prevalent they can make you dizzy, like those “gravity houses” in amusement parks.

After completing the loop, I next drove to a different area of the park, the Canyon section, where I took the scenic drive along a ridge to a point called Harper’s Corner. At the end of the drive is the Harper’s Corner trailhead, which continues another mile along the ridge to reach the very tip. First, some pictures from the drive:

	The road down below is the Echo Park Road, an unpaved route that leads down into the heart of the Canyons. It passed a number of points I’d like to see, including some archaeological sites, but it’s listed as impassable except to high-clearance vehicles. My car has 4-wheel drive but is not high-clearance, so I did the hike rather than this road.

And then, the hike:

The railing in the last photo marks how far the park service lets you go along the ridge. The picture shows the actual point known as Harper’s Corner, another hundred feet or so past the railing. But I was happy enough to stop right here! With sheer drops on either side of the overlook point, I felt no need to continue out to where it got even narrower.

The hike to Harper’s Corner brought my day to a close— or so I thought. As I posed yesterday, at dinner my day took a sudden left turn when a crown popped off one of my back teeth— and me around 1500 miles or so from my dentist! That set off a change of plans for the next day…

Day Nine: June 18

I was supposed to drive to Yellowstone National Park today. Instead, I spent the morning getting my teeth fixed. Knowing I wouldn’t have time for the drive after doing that, I extended my stay at my hotel here in Vernal, Utah by an extra day, and called the hotel in Yellowstone to tell them I’d be a day late. I next called my dentist in Dallas to tell him what had happened and get his advice, and after talking to him set out to find a local who could stick that crown back on.

Fortunately, it seems that Vernal, Utah must be the dental capitol of the country; there were two large practices, across the street from each other, a block from my hotel. The first one I visited was only seeing patients if they had COVID tests first, which takes about three days, so no help to me. But the second was happy to help me.

I took no pictures of my visit to the dentist. Unfortunately he found the crown had fallen off because Bad Things were happening to the tooth beneath it, but I can worry about that when I get home. For now, he was able to temporarily reattach it, and that should last long enough to see me through the rest of my trip. I may have to be careful how I chew trail mix while hiking.

Since I had an unplanned day in Vernal, I took a longish drive to another part of Dinosaur National Monument that I wouldn’t have had time for otherwise. The main destination was a huge petroglyph site, with many images carved into a long cliff face, but there were some other scenic spots at well.

	Fossils aside, this whole area has a dinosaurish feel to it; in places it looks like the Earth’s bones are sticking out of the ground.
The petroglyphs line the base of this cliff, with a narrow trail running along the base.

You can see more modern vandalism of the petroglyphs: at bottom right, “LM” thought he found just the right place to put his initials, and the pockmark just below is a bullet hole from someone who thought the 1000-year-old artwork made a good target.
It occurred to me that in another thousand years, archaeologists might find those bits of graffiti also valuable and worth preserving. But they will never be confused about which mattered more to the people who made them. The ancient petroglyphs are expertly crafted, with lines chipped out of the rock carefully to keep a consistent look, making pictures of distinctive design and intent. The modern initials are mere scratches, lazily and carelessly scrawled onto the rock. Future archaeologists might indeed value them for their age and as sins of our time, but they’ll never mistake them for the serious work they’ve marred.
But I’m pontificating to no purpose. More pictures:

Beyond the petroglyph site, the road meanders toward two campgrounds and some trailheads, and finally ends at an abandoned ranch.

	I don’t know how old the ranch is: it’s on the park map as the Ruple Ranch, but there’s no info text I could find about it. There’s no restoration of the interior or anything.

With that, my extra afternoon at Dinosaur comes to a close. Tomorrow I will drive to Yellowstone, if no new disaster occurs.

In planning this trip, I was originally going to stay at the historic Old Faithful Inn. But it closed due to the epidemic and hasn’t scheduled for reopening yet. The company that operates Yellowstone’s hotels gave me a “backup” reservation at hotels that will be open— actually cabins, they’re only opening lodges with freestanding cabins so far— but could only give me a split stay since nowhere had availability for the full set of dates. I was going to spend two nights at the first cabin and then shift. Now it will be only one night at the first cabin.

I’ve got a notice that there’s no internet at the first place I’ll be staying, so don’t expect a journal entry tomorrow. I think I should be able to post once I get to the second lodge, the day after tomorrow. But if not, I’ll catch up on this journal whenever I next have access.

Trip Report:

Miles driven today: 79.7
Total miles so far: 1640.9