|
FrontRangeLiving.com -> Outdoors -> Dinosaur National Monument
 Dinosaur National Monument: When Giants Walked the Earth
By Niki Hayden
Most visitors to Dinosaur National Monument arrive with kids in tow. After a fifth grade science project devoted to dinosaurs, there’s no
better vacation than a journey to see the real thing. And there’s no greater
collection of bones unearthed than is found here. But spend a day on site and
you’ll bump into human history, too. Just down the gravel road are exquisite
pictographs, etched into the rock surface 1,000 years ago by earlier residents.
Not far away is the collapsing cabin of a rugged settler—a woman who married
five times. Eventually she lived
alone and survived by her wits until her death at the age of 90 in 1964.
 Each site, so closely linked, reveals a land that has sheltered huge beasts,
tribes on the move and one stubbornly self-sufficient recluse. These could be
pieces of movie sets in a Hollywood studio jumbled together, but Dinosaur
National Monument, as David Whitman, Chief of Interpretation, tells an audience,
is the real thing. "I get asked a lot of questions and the most common is:
‘are these bones real?’ Yes, these are real and you won’t find many sites
like this."
In summer, the Monument is hot and crowded. When autumn arrives, most
visitors have returned home and the landscape is blissfully serene. Secluded in
a high desert canyon, the Monument is dotted with sagebrush and pinyon pines,
juniper and mountain mahogany shrubs. Small
springs sprout near Josephine Bassett’s broken down cabin, creating a lush
oasis where she raised a vegetable garden and tended cattle. The draw to all
creatures, over millions of years, has been the wide rivers. Here the Yampa
feeds into the Green River, languorous and nearly turquoise in color. Our rivers
today are dammed, except for the Yampa, which makes them well behaved. But in
earlier times, rivers carved the magnificent red and gold canyons that shelter
the Monument.
 The semi-arid conditions are perfect for preserving the remains of
prehistory. That’s what paleontologist Earl Douglass believed when he arrived
from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1909. The area proved to be a spectacular
find in the Morrison Formation, a band of red earth that contains remnants of
the Jurassic age 150 million years ago. Animals of all kinds were drawn to the
swampy river areas. Even more arrived when the region suffered a severe drought.
As dinosaurs congregated to slurp the last of the river bottom water, they died,
bodies piled upon bodies, so that the frieze of unearthed bones in the Dinosaur
Quarry reads like a wall of bones, nature's own book.
 Children are awed by the
bones, even if some see a few things that
don’t exist. "I see the bunny’s ears," one small girl exclaims to
her mother. David says adults often have approached him with a stunned look on
their faces. One man accused the government of concocting the bones, as a kind
of conspiracy to trick the American public. Another admitted that he had not
believed that dinosaurs really existed, but now was convinced. Others, David,
says believe they are looking at the debris from Noah’s biblical flood,
although no human walked the earth at the time these great beasts were dying in
a mass grave. "For some people, it is a religious experience," David
says, as he has heard the chattering and excitement just outside his office
door.
The Dinosaur Quarry, where the frieze of bones lies, is no longer the center
of research. "We could dig on, but we’d find more of the same,"
David says. Instead, he says that since 1990, the emphasis has been on
researching what kind of plants and animals lived here with the dinosaurs—the
frogs, lizards, mammals and insects. Of course it’s not only dinosaurs that
died here. The outline of giant clams indicates that dinner for other creatures
could be found in these rivers. There were at least 400 kinds of plants, mostly
ferns. "We now have a pretty good idea of the ecosystem," he says. The
Morrison Formation, named after Morrison, Colorado, where it was
first identified, was an ecosystem of warmth and humidity, a tropical paradise
that can hardly be imagined today.
There was good reason to shift into researching plant life. Most of the
dinosaur bones discovered were of herbivores. "It takes so many more
herbivores to be the food of the carnivores," he explains. To study this
wider group of dinosaurs, you’d have to discover what they ate and how much.
Perhaps that will explain the changes a massive drought caused.
By the time humans arrived, many of the same animals today were present.
Along the highway to the Monument, you’ll see pronghorn antelope edge their
way into cattle herds, perhaps to escape hunters. The sleek tan and white bodies
look like tufts of cotton in the shrubby land. River otters, bats, porcupines
and badgers may be more difficult to spot, but birds abound, their voices high
and far away, but piercing in the desert air.
 Along the Cub Creek Road are stops that indicate a trailhead or pictographs.
Many of the most famous images often reproduced in books come from this
Monument, the images etched into the soft sandstone canyon walls. Stippled
figures and animals are scratched into the surface. They’re faint today,
almost ghostly, but must have appeared bright and gleaming 1,000 years ago.
Exactly what they mean is a puzzle. But the human figure is obvious, and appears
beautifully arrayed. These early communicators could embellish a person or
animal with just a few strokes.
"We assume these were sacred sites," David says. "It takes a
fair amount of time to make them. There are hunting scenes as well as concentric
circles and spirals. Some of those symbols can be found in Africa, Australia and
California." Early people have left us with cryptic messages that only they
can explain, he says, although our imaginations lend mystery to their meanings.
Higher up, early people chipped into blackened areas of the cliffs, choosing
patches called desert varnish, a natural stain, to produce images of lizards, a
human figure playing a flute and bighorn sheep. They’re not easy to spot, but
once you do see them, they jump out, clear and recognizable, even after a
thousand or more years.
 The valley is filled with paintings and scratched images, but most are too
remote to be seen. It’s just as well because vandals have defaced some that
are accessible to visitors. These thousand-year-old messages, too, like the dinosaur bones, read
like a book of images whose language we can only guess at today.
At the end of the road sits the Josephine Bassett cabin. Josie, as she
was called, lived there during the original excavations of the Dinosaur Quarry. And remnants of her
life remain. A grapevine, unattended, clings to an old fence. Josephine
established her homestead here in 1914 when she lost an earlier homestead in
Brown's Park. She fenced off box canyons to keep
cattle, canned the vegetables from her garden, and created small channels to allow
spring water to flow wherever she needed it to be.
 At the age of 90, she fell, broke a hip and died from the complications of
that fall. A couple of picnic tables face her small cabin, alongside what once
was a fruit orchard. The grasses she planted for her horse still grow along
wetter areas, small
sheds for storing tack are crumbling and a narrow path leads to the box canyons.
All along the paths small creeks flow, creating lush environments for willows,
columbines and mosses amid a desert landscape. Like the dinosaurs and tribes
before her arrival, Josie survived by her wits and the gift of water, even if it
was only a few cold springs on her homestead.
 Today the Chew family continues to farm, growing
alfalfa and corn in a wide circle of green on the canyon floor. They are part of the
Monument that stretches across 210,844 acres, often surrounding ranches and
farms. The area is vast enough to straddle both Colorado and Utah, with one
entrance to a scenic canyon only, Harpers Corner, in Colorado. The entrance to
the Dinosaur Quarry, the major draw, is in Utah.
 And while the closest city is Vernal, Utah, has the usual
motels and chain restaurants, camping in
the Monument is worthwhile. A flat campsite alongside the Green River,
sequestered within a canyon is a peaceful respite from the hustle and bustle of
the outside world. Here, prehistory joins human history, all within a few yards.
The close proximity feels sacred, and must lead to the emotional intensity that
David often witnesses as he strolls among his visitors.
"If there is one word I could use to describe the Monument, that would
be diversity--of cultural, geologic and biological study. It's outstanding yet
unknown," he says. In a part of the country where long stretches of road
roll along empty spaces, Dinosaur National Monument is a destination where
giants once walked the earth and congregated, at one time in a busy dino
metropolis. Now they have left their bones, and ghosts, behind.
Dinosaur National Monument, 4545 E. Highway 40, Dinosaur, Colorado,
81610-9724, 970-374-3000; www.nps.gov./dino
|
