Dinosaur National Monument
3 October 1999

Luckily, we can do that - nothing makes us happier than grubbing about in the dirt,
looking at “stuff”.
 

Camping on BLM land just south of Dinosaur National Monument - the only time we actually ended up using our camping stuff.	Back into Utah again. Yay!
Antelope galloping across the road.	I've never seen antelope before.
The Dinosaur Quarry from the inside....	...and from the outside. They basically built the building around the cliff where they found so many dinosaur bones.
They've been chiselling away at this rock face since the early part of this century when a guy found some dinosaur vertebrae lying on the surface.  Millions of years ago, this lay flat and was part of the river bed. Dead dinosaurs got washed down and collected, presumably on a sand bank, and were gradually covered over with sediment and eventually turned to fossils.  They've extracted the some of the best whole dinosaur skeletons in the world from this site and they've barely scratched the surface.
At the top of the pic, you can make out a giant leg bone. Running left to right, diagonally across the top of the right hand side of the photo, there is a skull with some neck vertebrae attached. You can also see shoulder blades, femurs, and numerous other bits and bobs.  It's very odd, standing there, looking at millions-of-years-old bits of animal.  Very odd.
	A whole baby sauropod dinosaur  (brontosauruses (brontosauri?) are sauropods). (hint, the glass wall in front of it is about 5 foot tall)
Ornithopods - three-toed dinosaurs that we saw the footprints of in Moab.	This explains how they were vegetarian. They also surmised that ornithopods were strong fast runners (judging by the way their bones showed evidence of strong muscle attachements to them). No doubt they stayed alive by running away. Their teeth are *tiny*, so not much viscious, dinosaur-like yomping went on from these guys.
	A model of what one probably looked like.
Theropods - the yompy-type ones.	Theropod  skull with the dinosaur quarry rock face in the background.
This was a whole skeleton of a theropod, but the feet were the most interesting bits, seeing as we'd been looking at their footprints all week (on the Klondike Trail, and on the way to Colorado).

 

Flaming Gorge Damn. Shame about that, really. I bet Flaming Gorge was much better before they filled it with water...

Flaming Gorge:

 
 

Very pretty coloured rocks
Oooh, oooh, another state to add to the list!!! (don't think I'd want to live here, though. It's a bit wind-swept).	Back again into Utah (in and out, in and out)
We chose the route home because we wanted to go across the Great Salt Desert... except by the time we got to Salt Lake City (ack! A big city! ack!)(first time we'd seen "big city civilisation" in nearly ten days), detoured around the closed freeways and made our way across the south side of the Great Salt Lake, it was getting dark.  Oh well. You get to see the sun setting against the Salt Lake. It smelt a bit like seaweed.     And we got to drive the salt desert in the dark... it goes for 80 miles in a dead-straight line... very low maintenance driving. (Here's some pics from our Utah trip in 1995, showing it in the daylight from the west side)
We made it to Elko, Nevada that night, crashed in the Motel 6, and in the morning made the 430 mile journey home to Sacramento. As we were coming through the Sierra, we realised there was a fire somewhere close. It turned out to be on the Georgetown Divide, very close to a good friend's property. :(  (Three weeks after the fire, last weekend, I was riding Provo on the opposite side of the river and took some photos of where the fire started). Luckily, they managed to put the fire out within 24-36 hours - many others weren't so lucky this autumn. September and October have been very bad wildfire months and the Central Valley was often filled with thick ashy smoke.   :(

elsie@calweb.com
19 October 1999