Day 70 (July 23). Western Colorado

From: Green River, UT

To: Glenwood Springs, CO

Miles today: 196

Total miles: 14750

Before leaving the town of Green River in the morning, I visited the John Wesley Powell Museum located there.  Powell, as some people know, was an officer and lost an arm in the Civil War fighting for the Union, and is best known for exploring the Green and Colorado Rivers (the former being a tributary to the latter).  The rivers ran through the canyonlands of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona, including the Grand Canyon. The rivers were filled with brutal rapids, and the surrounding land difficult to traverse, so this area remained terra incognita after the rest of the map of what is now the Continental US had been surveyed.  Powell navigated the river system twice, the first time just trying to survive, and the second time creating actual useful maps. The river has since been dammed several times, drowning some of the worst (best) rapids, and one of the big lakes formed is Lake Powell.  What I didn’t appreciate was that Powell was actually a geologist, and created the US Geological Survey. He was also one of the few people of the time interested in documenting the cultures of the aboriginals who lived in the region. The museum itself was quite large and extensive for such a small town. 

The drive from Green River, Utah, into Colorado, was much smoother than the previous couple of hundred miles had been.  There were still castle-like formations to be seen on both sides, but they were much further away now, the road was straight.  I thought about taking the bypass to Moab, but it would have added 100 miles to the day, and I had been to Arches National Park once before.  Instead, a recurring display of the “Dinosaur Diamond” sites in the region (shown below) made reference to “Dinosaur Hill Interpretive Walk.”  There wasn’t much info on the sign itself, but there was cell phone service.  The place did not have a web site of its own, but it was referenced in others, and I got directions – it was a mile or two south of Fruita, Colorado, which was directly on my route. 

I saw this display at various rest stops along I-70.  Number 21 caught my eye.

Well, I got to Fruita¸ went south, and there was a pull-off that said “Dinosaur Hill.”  This must be the place.  In fact there was a parking area and some interpretive signs that said that Elmer Riggs of the Chicago Field Museum discovered a near-complete skeleton of an Apatosaurus (aka Brontosaurus) here in 1900, and excavated it in the following years. If you followed the 1-mile loop, you would go by the actual site.  Sure, I could handle a mile, even at my age, even with some up and down, and even in the heat – it was probably high 90’s.  The trail was well maintained near the trailhead, but turned out to get much worse in the middle.  There was some pretty steep climbing and descending over a what became a treacherous path, and motorcycle boots (for reasons that I don’t understand) are notoriously slick.  Had I known the conditions, I would have changed into sneakers.  Well, I made it without major incident, finally coming onto the site itself, a tunnel bored into the red sandstone that is one of the ubiquitous strata in the west.  They added one nice feature: a concrete replica (a cast, actually) of the original vertebrate bones that Riggs discovered.  It was really cool to see what he must have seen, in its original location.  The arduous (if not terribly long) hike to get there, combined with the fact that no one else was around, added to the ambience.

Dinosaur Hill Interpretive Trail, near Fruita, CO.  Left: the tunnel bored into the Dinosaur Hill (this is only one little piece of it) to extract the dinosaur skeleton in 1901.  Right: replica of what the paleontologists actually saw sticking out of the strata.  

Back in Fruita, I had lunch, and then visited a dinosaur museum called “Dinosaur Museum” there.  Another fairly large museum in a pretty small town.  I was hoping for some exhibits on the geology of the region and how the skeleton came to be there – the strata it was found in is not the famous Morrison Formation where most of the dinosaur fossils in this state were from – but had no luck.  It turned out to be aimed at kids, with animatronic dinosaur models and impossibly complete skeletons, indicating that they were casts or flat-out models.  I waited around for the movie they showed periodically, but this turned out to be one of those “Walking with Dinosaurs” episodes you see on the Discovery Channel.  I didn’t stick around for it, and got back on the cycle.  I will say that behind some glass and other protective barriers, the museum did have some nice real dinosaur fossils collected from the region.

Real fossils at the Dinosaur Museum in Fruita, CO.  Left: vertebrae from a large aquatic reptile, which could be easily confused for rocks.  Right: pelvis of a large sauropod, as it was found. 

My destination was the town of Glenwood Springs, Colorado, which had two things to offer. The first was a Honda Cycle shop where maybe I could get my oil changed in the morning – but it turned out to be permanently closed.  The second was a cheap place to stay about 40 miles away from the town of Aspen, where Karen would be flying into tomorrow morning.  The ride was pleasant, but somehow I missed the transition from the Colorado Plateau (with castles, canyons, and mesas) to the Southern Rockies (with mountains). The transition took place somewhere around 30 miles west of Glenwood Springs, on I-70.  Here are comparison shots – one from about 40 miles out, and the second one from the town itself.  The same strata exist, especially that huge band of red sandstone, but the shapes are completely different.  What’s more, the angles of the strata were both large and varied, indicating I had reached the area where the rocks were folded as opposed to simply uplifted. 

Geologic transition from Castles (left: "Colorado Plateau") to Mountains (right: "Southern Rockies")

Tomorrow, Aspen and Karen!