Adventures,  North America,  Round the World Trip,  United States

U.S.A. Road Trip: Dinosaur National Monument and Arches National Park, Utah

And so, once we were out of the ‘Flat Bits’ phase of our road trip, we quickly entered the ‘Lots of National Parks In a Short Space of Time’ chapter. Just in time we invested $80 in an America the Beautiful card to allow us entry into any National Park (usual cost ~$35 per entry per car) as well as a bunch of other benefits such as free day parking and half price camping in National Forests and Bureau of Land Management land. A steal for anyone planning on visiting more than two sites in a year – people just like us as it turns out.

After a brief but fun couple of days in Wyoming our route to ‘National Park Land’ took us south west into Colorado, on a majestic pass up and over the rocky mountains and down through the prestigious Steamboat Springs ski resort. There was still a good deal of snow lying at these altitudes in early June.

Dinosaur National Monument

Straddling Colorado and Utah, Dinosaur National Monument has hundreds of miles of trails through 210,000 acres of mountains, deserts and canyons, popular for hiking, fishing and white water rafting, but the big draw is Carnegie Dinosaur Quarry. Impressive though the site is, it represents only the scrag ends of one of the most abundant dinosaur fossil sites ever found. In 1909, Earl Douglass discovered eight dinosaur tailbones sticking out of the rocks here and started one of the most famous dinosaur digs of all time. Over 500 dinosaurs from eleven different species were excavated from the 150ma Jurassic Morrison Formation between 1909 and 1922, including the holotype fossil of the Apatosaurus.

Many of the finds can now be seen at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. However, there are still 1500 bones carefully exposed, but left in-situ in a 20 metre tall section of the quarry wall, protected from the elements by a purpose built two storey hall. There are dozens of bits of therapods and huge sauropod bones sticking out of the wall, a Camarasaurus skull still attached to its cervical vertebrae, stegosaurus plates and countless other delights as you scan the wall.

Downstairs in the hall are some sections where you can touch real dinosaur bones, some as big as your average six year old.

The rocks at dinosaur also preserve an uncommonly long chronostratigraphy, with an almost complete record from Precambrian through to present day. There is an easily accessible Fossil Discovery Trail from the quarry to the visitor centre which cleverly walks through time, with fossils to spot along the way, from massive dinosaur femurs and vertebrae to fish scales and the impressions of clam shells, making the kids feel like palaeontologists discovering finds in the area.

Fremont people Pictographs

We camped within Dinosaur National Monument at the Green River Campground, along with lots of wildlife including a million mosquitos, white tailed prairie dogs, chipmunks keen for an easy meal from the campers and a very large bird, roughly the size of Odessa and possibly some sort of turkey which chased us with a loud squawk as we came too close to its home. From the campsite, we took an enjoyable stroll along the Green River Trail with views of the river and Split Mountain. About 1000 years ago, long after the dinosaurs disappeared, the land here became home to the Fremont people who left their mark with abundant pictographs (created by chiselling rock with a tool) and petrolyths (images painted with pigments) into the rocks. We walked a section of the Hidden Voices Trail to see some of these impressive ancient artworks and enjoyed trying to decode the meaning behind the images.

Real fossil dinosaur footprints!

Next up, we headed due south for the first time on the trip. Outside Moab, we stopped at Mill Canyon Dinosaur Tracksite, one of a number of ichnofacies sites in the area where the trails of dinosaurs of a range of sizes along with their contemporary reptiles, birds and mammals have been preserved in now petrified sticky mud and algal mats from the Early Cretaceous. There are more than 200 individual tracks identified here. We enjoyed the short walk on boardwalks raised above the trace fossils and interpretive signs about the dinosaurs and the environment in which they lived.

Arches National Park (the famous one)

Established in 1929, Arches National Park is one of those classic US landscapes, one you might picture when thinking of a US National Park. The park has the world’s highest concentration of natural stone arches, with over 2000.

There’s also other rock formations like pinnacles and balanced rocks carved out of the dark red Jurassic Entrada sandstone. The park is also really popular. Although we had our magic access all areas America the Beautiful Card to get us entry, we had to book a timed entry slot for Arches (using the recreation.gov app). Some of these slots are released three months in advance, and another batch released at 6pm the night before. We were lucky enough to bag one of these ‘on the day’ tickets and dutifully arrived to queue up at the entrance at our allotted time. Reviews suggest the timed entry approach has helped to improve the experience for visitors and reduce queues and closures which were becoming commonplace.

Once inside the park, there’s a loop road with plenty of viewpoints, car parks and places to head off and enjoy the rocks on hikes of a variety of lengths and difficulty. First up, we called in at the visitor centre to fill up on drinking water and collect our Junior Ranger packs before heading off to enjoy the spectacular views. The kids particularly enjoyed the comedy names of some of the rocks, such as the parade of elephants and the three gossips and scrambling over the rocks in the Windows Section.

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