Looking for fossils and fossil hunters in a gorgeously
beautiful and remote part of the West
Kids of all ages love dinosaurs. As a six year-old, I remember playing with plastic
dinosaurs with names like Brontosaurus, Triceratops, and Tyrannosaurus Rex and
imagining around 100 million years ago when those big reptiles walked the earth. It kept me occupied for hours. A recent visit to Fossil Butte National Monument
in Wyoming and Dinosaur National Monument
in Utah rekindled my childhood dinosaur interest. And while plastic dinosaurs are prevalent in
the book stores at both places, the joy of these sites is seeing real
fossilized dinosaur bones and visualizing the gargantuan size of these beasts and
pondering how their bones stayed preserved for us to enjoy today.
My girlfriend Craig and I were traveling through that remote
part of the West where Utah, Wyoming and Idaho meet on the front-end of a month-long
trip to add a few more stamps to our national park passports. Fossil Butte is in Wyoming and there is no
camping available, so we settled into a great campsite at Utah’s Bear
Lake State Park about an hour away.
There are not a lot of beer options in rural Utah but fortunately Bear
Lake is close enough to Idaho that we were able cross the state line and hit Cooper’s,
a local sports bar, for a little college football and cold beer before we went
fossil hunting. Each state provided a
critical component of our Fossil Butte visit!
Bear Lake State Park
All of this region was once under what paleontologists call
Fossil Lake, a sub-tropical lake that existed back in the Eocene
Epoch 34 – 56 million years ago.
Since then, erosion has carried away much of the old lake sediments, exposing
fossil layers in the remaining hills and buttes. Today this region is part of the larger Green
River Formation and hosts an amazing assortment of well-preserved plant
and animal fossils, including an especially rich 18-inch sediment layer from
the bottom of ancient Fossil Lake that serves up some of the best preserved
fish fossils in the world.
Fossil Butte
Fossils at Fossil Butte were first reported by government
scientists in the mid-1800s. When the
Oregon Shortline Railroad was built through the area in 1881 and the town of
Fossil was born to support the railroad, regular fossil collecting began in
earnest. The most famous collector was
Robert Lee “Peg Leg” Craig who had lost his leg in a mining accident, but that
didn’t slow him down. He collected in
the region for 40 years beginning in 1897 and was featured in a 1934 National
Geographic article. Another famous
collector was David Haddenham, who collected on the site now protected by the
National Monument. His cabin, which he
used during the summer collecting months, still stands and is accessible on the
Historic Quarry Trail. It is a pretty
rustic affair and one can only imagine the primitive living conditions as he
dug fossils out of the hillside above the cabin.
Craig at Haddenham's Cabin
Priscacara and Diplomystus from Ulrich's quarry
Our visit to Ulrich’s didn’t include watching fossils being cleaned and prepared, but a visit to the Park Service Visitor Center showed us how it is done. An NPS employee, using a very small air brush, demonstrated how the surrounding rock layers are carefully scoured away to reveal the fossil underneath. This alone is worth the stop at the visitor center. The bonus is over 300 fossils on display, including a 10 foot-long crocodile! The visitor center also provided us with a trail map that guided us into the hills above the visitor center for a 1.5 mile loop hike through sagebrush and aspen. The monument’s self-interpreted nature trail starts and ends at a nice shaded picnic area where we had lunch.
Author at the Visitor Center
The coolest hike is the 2.5 mile Historic Quarry Trail loop. It is a bit of a climb up to the fossil
bearing layers (650 feet), but the Park Service has done a great job of
providing safe access to this historic quarry and, of course, it is well
interpreted and you can see fossils in place.
If you only have time for one hike, do this one. It is along this trail that you can experience
the primitive conditions that David Haddenham lived in while quarrying fossils
a hundred years ago. Congress protected
these fossil bearing hills in 1972 to tell the story of these fossils and historic
fossil collectors.
Trail up to the quarry
The next stop on our fossil journey led us on a very scenic drive
from Fossil Butte through Flaming Gorge and the High Uintas to Dinosaur
National Monument. Dinosaur is listed under
Colorado on our national park app, but the easy and must see places to visit are
in Utah. We camped for three days at the
Green River Campground, beautifully located right on the river a few miles
downstream from its confluence with the Yampa.
Campsites can be reserved ahead of time, though we rolled in
mid-afternoon and had no problem getting a site. There is plenty to see and do
at Dinosaur and with any visit to a new park, it starts at the visitor center.
Flaming Gorge
The Quarry visitor center, which is open all year, is just
down the hill from the monument’s biggest and must-see attraction, the Quarry
Exhibit Hall. And while you can drive to
the hall, we strongly suggest you take the 1.2 mile Fossil Discovery Trail and
see how many fossils you can find along the way. The exhibit hall, first built in 1958, covers
an entire hillside of Jurassic era dinosaur fossils (150 million years old) that
are just emerging from the ground. This
hillside was once a river bed, which is why so many bones are found here and it
is a rare opportunity to see them in place.
Inside the Exhibit Hall
This amazing stash of dinosaur bones was first discovered by
Earl
Douglas in 1909 when he was prospecting for the Carnegie
Museum. Douglas spotted 8 large bones
sticking out of the ground and began excavating. For the next 15 years, until 1924, several
hundred tons of fossils were collected and shipped to museums and universities
all across the country. It was Douglas,
in a letter to the Smithsonian in 1923, who first suggested leaving some bones
in place for the public to view. This amazing
collection of fossils prompted President Woodrow Wilson to use the Antiquities
Act in 1915 to create the initial monument which President Franklin
Roosevelt then expanded by 200,000 acres 33 years later.
Fast forward to 1952 when the Park Service resumed work on
the quarry site to realize Douglas’s idea of exposing bones in-place for the
public to experience. The first fossil shelter
was built in 1958 with final quarrying to expose bones completed in 1992. Shifting soils made the first shelter
unstable and the site closed for a five year rehabilitation, reopening in 2011. The current version is not to be missed. The park’s brochure says there are over 1,500
fossils embedded in the rock covered by the exhibit hall. We spent the good part of an hour checking it
out. And while they let you touch a few
of them, be sure and take your binoculars so you can see the rest up close and
personal.
Author with a Camarasaurus femur
But there is more to Dinosaur than the fossils. On our first
visit to the visitor center, one of NPS’s many awesome Park Rangers suggested
two hikes that we both thoroughly enjoyed.
On the north side of the monument, about a two hour drive from the
campground, is the Jones Hole Trail.
Named by John Wesley Powell in 1869 for his expedition photographer
Stephen Vandiver Jones, this trail begins at a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
fish hatchery and drops 600 feet over 4 miles down to Jones Hole on the Green
River.
Jones Hole Trail on a beautiful October day
This was one of the best hikes of our month-long journey
through a dozen or so national park sites in the Intermountain West. The canyon walls at the beginning of hike are
steep, shear and colored the awesomely beautiful sandstone red you find all
over Utah. The trail is in good shape
and follows the well-watered stream through lush vegetation featuring box elder
and juniper. It was fall, so the yellow box
elder against the red rocks, blue sky, and tumultuous white clouds (courtesy of
hurricane Rosa) made the hike’s visuals eye-poppingly gorgeous. We watched fish in the stream and spotted a
good diversity of birds including Wilson’s warbler, Townsend’s solitaire, and
spotted towhee. The rangers told us to
look out for desert bighorn, but they eluded us. The trail took us by some very cool pictographs
on the canyon walls and, best of all, we saw NO ONE though we danced a bit with
a late afternoon rain shower.
Pictograph left by the Fremont People
The other great hike was much closer to where we were
camped. The Sound of Silence trail is a
3.2 mile loop starting at a trailhead about 2 miles from the visitor
center. This self-guided trail winds its
way down washes and along ridge lines through numerous colorful rock layers. A very informative trail guide discusses the
geology, vegetation, and the impact of ancient and recent erosion on the
landscape. It was a wonderful hike that
links up with the Desert Voices Trail, another loop starting from the Split
Mountain picnic area on the Green River, to make an even longer hike.
Craig on the Sound of Silence Tral
The highlight of our Sound of Silence jaunt was watching a rock wren and plateau fence lizard battle it out on the trail right in front of us. It ended in a standoff with the lizard’s tail in the wren’s mouth and the lizard’s jaws firmly clamped on the wren’s leg. Mother Nature running wild just a few feet in front of us! It was one of the few times I wished I had a really good camera. Another highlight of the hike was a steep climb up a sloping rock face to a 360 degree view of the landscape that is Dinosaur National Monument. If you can take the heights, scramble up this rock face for the view.
Author on top of the steep climb
We also did the Cub Creek Road auto tour which highlights
petroglyphs made by the Freemont people some 1,000 years ago. At one of the petroglyph stops we shared the
experience with a busload of kids from Salt Lake City – part of a Park Service
program called Concrete to Canyons that started in Zion and is being expanded
to Dinosaur. The excitement of city kids
being introduced to the natural and cultural wonders of our park system is
inspiring. The auto tour ends at the
historic Josie Morris Cabin, part of a small ranch Josie lived on from 1914 to
1964.
Petroglyph left by the Fremont People
Josie was a wild one.
She was married five times, was an alleged associate of Butch Cassidy,
was accused (but not convicted) of rustling cattle twice and hoodwinked her
neighbors in a water rights dispute that you’ll have to read about when you
visit. Her five room cabin is open for
you to explore and there is a short trail up Box Canyon, where Josie built a
fence to create a corral for her cattle.
Another longer trail heads out through the poplar trees and meadows to
Hog Canyon. Like some of our previous
hikes at Dinosaur, there was so no one else on the trails.
Box Canyon
There is much more to do at Dinosaur than we had time
for. With over 90 % of the park in
wilderness, exploring the park by rafting the Green or Yampa, or driving the
few backcountry roads to Harper’s Corner, Echo Park or the Gates of Lodore could
easily have added a week to our visit. These
two park units were a highlight of our trip and while the dinosaurs were
certainly the unique draw to these two locations, the landscape and scenery
added to a visit we will gladly do again.
