Rocks, Fossils and Petroglyphs

Hi Blog!

On Tuesday, September 5, 2017, we woke with a purpose. Kim Chaney had given us an assignment - explore Dinosaur National Monument and come home with lizard petroglyphs. It wasn't easy, but with the help of the park rangers, we discovered the elusive twin lizards!

Our day started with a visit to the Quarry Visitor Center where we hopped on the shuttle bus to the Quarry Exhibit Hall. What makes this area unusual is the sheer number of dinosaur bones deposited in one location. Paleontologists believe the dinosaurs died along an ancient river. During times of flooding, the stream washed down all the bones and they piled up in this giant log jam. They were buried in sand, which eventually was pressed underground into sandstone.  During the uplift of the Colorado Plateau, the bones were exposed. To protect the fossils, a giant exhibit hall was constructed over this wall of bones.

The dinosaur fossil beds were discovered in 1909 by Earl Douglass, a paleontologist working and collecting for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. He and his crews excavated thousands of fossils and shipped them back to the museum in Pittsburgh for study and display. President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the dinosaur beds as Dinosaur National Monument in 1915. The monument boundaries were expanded in 1938 from the original 80-acre tract surrounding the dinosaur quarry in Utah, to its present extent of over 200,000 acres in Utah and Colorado, encompassing the spectacular canyons of the Green and Yampa Rivers. Not all the fossils went East.

Rather than wait for the shuttle bus, we walked back to the Visitor Center. We were greeted by this lizard spirit and knew that today would be a good day to find lizard petroglyphs.

After leaving the Visitor Center, we followed the Tour of the Tilted Rocks, an auto guidebook for the Cub Creek Road. We stopped at several scenic overlooks before descending to the banks of the Green River. We stopped at Placer Point. In the 1930s, a dredge was built to extract gold from the river. However, the gold was too fine to extract profitably. But that didn't stop Kathy from trying her luck.

As we continued on our tour, we passed "Turtle Rock" and ....

Elephant Toes Butte, a petrified sand dune over 200 million years old.

Archeologists first studied and named the Fremont culture from sites along the Fremont River in south-central Utah. Their unique cultural traits emerged around the year 450 AD and have been found throughout most of Utah and parts of Colorado, Nevada and Idaho. The Fremont were contemporaries with Ancestral Puebloan cultures found further south in the Four Corners region.

Animal figures include bighorn sheep like this big guy.

While the human figures and geometric designs were intriguing, we were on the hunt for lizards! Like this monster!

After finding as many lizards as we could, we stopped to admire this ancient flute player.

After tracking down the elusive lizards, we stopped for lunch at the old Josephine Bassett Morris ranch.  Josie was an independent woman who succeeded in running a ranch on her own, her whole life.  She had five husbands - divorced four of them and survived the death of the fifth.  She was an alleged cattle rustler and reputed to keep the company of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  Indeed, some have speculated that Josie was the real identity of the mysterious Etta Place, who accompanied Butch and Sundance in some of their exploits and travels. 

Josie built several cabins successively on her ranch, and this was the most recent:

After lunch, we headed out to the back-of-the-beyond. The park ranger in the Visitor Center suggested that if we really wanted to see classic Fremont petroglyphs, we need to drive over to McKee Spring, located in a remote part of the Monument. it was well worth the trip.

Give me a home where the buffalo roam and the sky is not cloudy all day!

McKee Springs displays some of the finest large human-like designs in Dinosaur National Monument. This dude holding a shield and displays many diagnostic features of the Classic Vernal Style of Fremont rock art. This is the guy they put in the textbooks.

Sometimes the petroglyphs jump out at you. Other times, you have walk past them and get the angle of the sun just right to see them pop.

Finding petrogylphs is like looking for a geocache. You know its there; you just have to find it. We found dozens of them. If you want to see more cool looking gylphs, click this link to our Flickr album of all our petroglyphs from Dinosaurland.

We have one more day in Vernal which means one more adventure. Stay tuned.