Day #71, August 28

Up and away after coffee and watching foraging rabbits to visit the Dinosaur Quarry Exhibit, a remarkable work indeed. Many of the Monument’s dinosaur fossils came out of an area extensively studied by Earl Douglass, Carnegie Museum of Natural History staff member in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1908, Mr. Douglas started looking for dinosaur fossils in the Uinta Basin. After some disappointments, he found the quarry that became Dinosaur National Monument. He continued to excavate it for the Carnegie until he died in 1931, but his legacy lives on with the monument. The dinosaur quarry exhibit was one of the many innovative ideas he had about educating the public about the life and times of these creatures. A massive building constructed over a portion of the quarry wall, showing a conflagration of dinosaur bones washed up together and shown in the wall exactly as Douglas had found them. One can stroll along a cat walk, touch the fossils and wonder at the lives these phenomenal animals lived.

Away we go back to route #40 and a long drive eastward across the Colorado Plateau at six thousand feet rising toward Rocky Mountain National Park. Many horses, cattle and domesticated bison. Through hot dry country into Jensen, Dinosaur and Maybell where we crossed the Yampa River, through tiny ghostly hamlets and Craig, Hyden, Steamboat Springs and Kremmling, where we crossed the Colorado River, then through Hot Sulfur Springs and Grandy, ever rising toward the great Rocky Mountains. Camped at Timber Creek on the west side of the park. Tomorrow we cross the spine of the Rockies.