After visiting Arches National Park, I involuntarily awoke at 5:00 the
next morning with a splitting migraine headache. Our plan had been to wake up early and drive
another 250 miles north of Moab to visit Dinosaur National Monument, but there was no
way I was going to be able to manage that.
I took my migraine medication then made an alternate plan for the day.
Step One of my plan was to allow the boys to sleep as late
as they possibly would. That enabled me
to have quiet solitude for a few hours while nursing my headache. By the time everyone woke up and got dressed,
I took everyone to a Denny’s restaurant for breakfast (brunch?) around 10:00 in
the morning. We had a leisurely
breakfast, and I started to feel a bit better by this time. We hit the road after breakfast and actually
did make the drive to Dinosaur National Monument, but we arrived in the late
afternoon and only checked into a hotel instead of visiting the park. We had a low-key evening and went to bed
early.
(What’s the difference between a National Park and a
National Monument, anyway? Well,
apparently a National Park is established by an act of Congress whereas a
National Monument is established by an executive order by the President of the
U.S. Besides that fact, they are
essentially the same thing.)
The next day, Thursday, April 3rd, feeling
completely recuperated, we went to Dinosaur National Monument first thing in the
morning. We were among the first
visitors of the day.
At Dinosaur NM, visitors aren’t allowed to see the bone quarry
without being escorted by a park ranger.
In order to manage crowds, the park offers ranger-guided tours at the
bottom of every hour. The first tour of
the day was at 9:30, and we were able to belong to that first group which beat most of the crowd for the day.
We drove via ranger-led auto caravan up the hill to the world-famous
Carnegie Dinosaur Quarry. The bone
quarry is an excavated hillside in which nearly 1500 dinosaur bones are
exposed. We saw amazing fossils of
Allosaurus, Apatosaurus, Camarasaurus, Diplodocus, and Stegosaurus, among
others. The quarry exhibit hall allowed
us to see the excavated rock layer in an enclosed space. In some places we could touch real 149
million year old dinosaur fossils!
These fossils were first discovered in 1909 by
paleontologist Earl Douglass for the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania. Some fossils were so well
preserved that the entire skeletal structure was intact. These full skeletons were excavated and transported
to the museum in Pittsburgh, but the rest of the fossils were left behind still
embedded in the wall of rock. So well
preserved are the layers of rock and fossils that scientists can reconstruct how the area
looked 150 million years ago. (The
dinosaur quarry lies in a rock layer called the Morrison Formation.)
After our time at the Dinosaur Quarry had ended, our park
ranger led us out and back to the visitor center. There we finished up the Junior Ranger
workbooks and watched the park film. In
total we spent only about two hours at Dinosaur NM, but all the boys really enjoyed
seeing the numerous fossilized dinosaur bones. (After all, what boy doesn't find dinosaurs fascinating?)
When we were done at the park, we started our 250-mile
journey back to Salt Lake City, arriving back home to our camper by
dinnertime. In our three-day road trip,
we drove a total of 775 miles and saw a whole lot of rural, uninhabited Utah. We drove through a different mountain pass
each day of our journey, encountering sleet, snow, and freezing rain in the
higher elevations. I was white-knuckled while driving through the mountain switchbacks in the sleet and snow. So scary!
But we managed to make it through the three mountain ranges intact, and
we’re all the better for it. Even through scary mountain passes, sleet, snow,
migraine headaches, and expensive hotels, we all really enjoyed the scenery of
the trip and the two national parks that we visited.
