August 24, 2015 Vernal, Utah

We drove from Carbondale , Colorado to Vernal, Utah on our way to pick up our motor home in Oregon.

We went through Dinosaur, Colorado at one end of Dinosaur National Monument, into Utah, by Dinosaur and into Vernal and checked into the Dinosaur Inn. Welcome to Vernal, Utah. Kind of a dinosaur theme here. . .

 

Here I am in front of the visitors center at Dinosaur. We were calling this an appaloosauras. . . I used my senior parks pass for the first time going into Dinosaur! From the visitors center you take a shuttle to the Dinosaur Quarry which is this huge building built over a wall of fossils. This was once a prehistoric river. The carcasses of the the dinosaurs all washed together into a ‘logjam’, sand silted around them and they petrified. In this face there are 1,5oo bones. They already removed many whole skeletons and sent them to museums around the country.

This is a close up of part of the wall. The skeletons were some of the best preserved fossils ever found, the most  and many of them were in perfect alignment as in life. Skulls like this one are very rare to find in this condition.  John is standing in front of an allosaurus skeleton.

This is a cast of  how the allosaurus was found in the rock. You get to touch real dinosaur bones here. After the quarry we walked on the fossil trail back to the visitors center.

 

Here are some of the fossils we saw in the wild. The top left is dinosaur vertebrae, then clam shells, and fish scales. The bug was on a rabbit bush on the trail. The Yampa and  Green rivers runs through the park. John has boated on some of the juicier portions of both.

Some of the rock formations on the fossil trail.  

After the fossils we went on the Tilted Rock scenic drive and  viewed petroglyphs. The bottom right of the 4 is Kokopelli.  He is a well known flute player petroglyph seen in the southwest.

 

John photographing a wall of glyphs. The coolest were these giant lizard ones. Dinosaur is the  only place there are lizard glyphs like these.

 

View of the Cub Creek valley the drive was in. At the end of the drive was the ranch homestead of Josie Morris.  She was married 5 times and in the end decided living single was better. There is a spring here, so it is very lush.

      

Looking south from Josie’s cabin.