RV Road trip Day 14: Dinosaur
Our final planned sight was Dinosaur National Monument, which is in the top northeast corner of Utah/northwest corner of Colorado. The Utah side is where the dinosaurs are and since that’s the direction we were coming from, we went to the Utah side of the park. Again our America the Beautiful pass got us in to the monument.
Western Colorado/Eastern Utah is my favorite terrain to drive through. The scrubby desert plants and dramatic mountains and canyons just get me at a gut level in a way that lush greenery doesn’t.
The main draw of Dinosaur National Monument is, you guessed it, the dinosaur bones. We parked at the main visitors center, donned our masks and hopped on the shuttle up to the Quarry Exhibit Hall. The quarry wall is preserved by a gallery built on/around it so visitors can see the fossils in the rock.
If you’ve been following our adventures, you may remember that on day 2 we were disappointed not to see petroglyphs. Lucky for us, there are several accessible spots to see them at Dinosaur. I can’t help by think that they look like stories of aliens coming to Earth but I know they’re just stylized human-like figures.
Dinosaur is in beautiful terrain so we took a slow drive around to catch some scenic views. It was very very very hot so we skipped hiking but I’d love to go back some day when it’s not 97 degrees and spend more time there.
