Dinosaur National Monument

Today was our second day in Dinosaur National Monument after visiting the eastern part yesterday and writing about it here. This time we visited the quarry and hiked The Sound of Silence Trail.

Quarry

First up, we hiked from the entrance gate to the Dinosaur Quarry to check out all the dinosaur bones. Paleontologist Earl Douglass of the Carnegie Museum discovered eight vertebra of an Apatosaurus on August 17, 1909, which became the first dinosaur skeleton discovered and excavated at the new Carnegie Quarry. The “Wall of Bones” located within the Dinosaur Quarry building in the park consists of a steeply tilted rock layer which contains thousands of dinosaur fossils. At the time the animals were alive, evidence indicates that this place was a sandbar in a stream bed. Bodies likely accumulated here from the waterflow and it is not necessarily where the animals died. The mixture of the remains of swamp-dwelling dinosaurs with the remains of dry-land types, together with other clues, suggests that some of the bodies might have floated and washed appreciable distances before becoming stranded on the sandbar.

Sound of Silence Trail

Dinosaurs roamed the very land we hiked on! It was easy to imagine what the land might have looked like and how amazing it would have been to see dinosaurs alive and thriving. But alas, all we saw were a billion lizards, and a bunny. This trail followed the wash for the first half and then got more interesting as we hiked up into the rock formations. It isn’t a very hard hike, though it can get pretty hot. The landscape where the red rock meets the white limestone is striking and it never gets old to look at. At the highpoint we got a pick-a-boo glance of Green River too.

The dominant tree in this area is the Utah Juniper. It seems like these trees can grow anywhere and the secret is in their roots. The tap root can be 25 feet deep and lateral roots may extend out 100 feet! We also saw giant cottonwoods, sagebrush, ash trees, prince’s plume, paintbrush, and lupine.

Speaking of Green River, after our hike we drove over to Split Mountain Campground to get another look at the river. This is a popular river rafting spot and it was pretty inviting on a hot day.