The approach to Fossil Butte National Monument/Jim Stratton

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 about 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.

Craig at the Haddenham cabin/Jim Stratton

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.

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.

Priscacara and Diplomystus from Ulrich's quarry/Jim Stratton

These men, and others, started what continues today as a thriving private fossil industry fed by 11 quarries located on private land (which is only 1 percent of the total fossil-bearing lands) and several more on state land leases. There are two scientific quarries found on federal land, one of them being Fossil Butte National Monument.  We visited Ulrich’s Fossil Gallery, one of these private quarries, and purchased a beautiful specimen that now hangs in our house. It reminds us daily of just how insignificant we are in the grand journey of life on our planet. The Ulrich’s website has good videos on how these fossils are quarried and prepared for sale.

Our visit to Ulrich’s didn’t include watching fossils being cleaned and prepared, but a visit to the Fossil Butte Visitor Center showed us how it is done. A Park Service 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 more than 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. 

Inside the Fossil Butte Visitor Center/Courtesy of author

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.

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.

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.

This amazing stash of dinosaur bones was first discovered by Earl Douglas in 1909 when he was prospecting for the Carnegie Museum. Douglas spotted eight 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 in 2006 for a five year rehabilitation, reopening in 2011. The current version is not to be missed. The park’s brochure says there are more than 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.

Jim Stratton with a Camarasaurus femur at Dinosaur National Monument/Courtesy of author

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. 

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 in Jones Hole, Dinosaur National Monument/Jim Stratton

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. 

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 rockface for the view.

We also did the Cub Creek Road auto tour that 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. 

A fall day in Jones Hole Canyon/Jim Stratton

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.

There is much more to do at Dinosaur than we had time for. With more than  90 percent of the park in wilderness, exploring Dinosaur 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.