I had so many plans for camping trips this summer, but a lot of them had to be shelved when August arrived and turned out not to be as accommodating as I'd hoped. I started having to work a lot of weekends to fill in for other people who were taking their vacation now. It's only fair, I suppose, since I'd had my turn taking time off, but I had wanted to use my weekends for some short camping trips.
I had promised the kids one last trip before the school year began, and it looked like this had to be the week. I checked the weather report for several of my preferred destinations--Capitol Reef National Park, Great Basin National Park, Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, or Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho. A good storm must be coming in this weekend, because every single one of them had rain forecasted.
Then I found it, Dinosaur National Monument was looking clear. So, I got us ready. It was going to be another trip with Daddy, like the one we took to Black Canyon of the Gunnison, only a little shorter this time. My wife had to work again, so she couldn't come. I put together my specialty meals: peanut butter sandwiches, hot dogs, and cereal. Then we packed up the car, and early Saturday afternoon, we headed out.
The weather was horrible the entire way. It was looking like it was going to be a repeat of our last camping with Daddy adventure. It poured rain so hard that I could barely see out my front window most of the way. My wipers were working overtime just so I could see the road ahead of me. Needless to say, I was frustrated. I didn't really want to camp in the rain.
We outpaced the storm, however, right before we got to the park. It cleared up for just a bit, but we could tell it was headed in our direction, and soon in would be back on top of us.
We stopped at the visitor center for a short moment, just to ask about what was the best way to see the park, then we hurried to the campground, so that we could get our tent set up before the rain hit.
It was quite a struggle, because the wind was treating our tent like the sail on a boat. It took all our strength to keep it from blowing away before we got it staked down. And the rain was starting to come. It wasn't much yet, just some sprinkles, but things weren't looking good. Eventually, we got everything squared away, and were ready to go see the sights.
The rain never really materialized. It only sprinkled a little, then quit. So, we had one thing to be happy about. Maybe it would all blow away, and we would be allowed to enjoy things in dry clothes. Instead of having to dash from the car to the viewpoint and back again as quick as we could. Maybe we might even be able to do some real hiking.
We went back to the visitor center to take the shuttle bus up to the dinosaur quarry, only to discover that the last bus of the day had already finished its run. We were going to have to wait to see dinosaurs until the next morning.
Little loved the dinosaur statue out front of the visitors center, and did his very best to reach over from beyond the fence and touch it. He named the dinosaur Happy, and talked about him constantly throughout the trip.
Instead of going to the quarry, we drove along the Cub Creek Road. There were supposed to be a bunch of pictographs left here by the ancient Puebloan people. I was pretty excited to see these. There's tons of places in the mountain west that have them, but this would be my first time laying eyes on any.
They didn't disappoint. They were really interesting pictures.
It made me wish that I'd done some research before coming to visit so that I'd have some information about the pictographs to tell the kids. I needed a tour guide or something.
More than I knew, it turned out. All along the road, there were several spots of interest. Each spot was marked with a sign that had a picture of a pictograph on it. Only some of these places were the sites of pictographs, however. The others had some other significance to them, but I didn't know what it was. I just assumed they all were pictographs, so the next time we saw a sign, we stopped the car, got out, and wandered around looking for a place that pictographs might be hiding.
Eventually, consulting our map, we came to realize that there were no more pictographs until we were a long ways further down the road. We got back in the car, and finally found them.
They were really amazing. The idea of a drawing that I'd made lasting for more than a thousand years is crazy, but that's exactly what these are.
What will remain of me in a thousand years? I suppose our future ancestors...er, progeny? Is that what you call them?...will certainly be reading these blog posts and marveling at what life was like in 2016.
Nah, I'm lucky to get anybody to read these now-a-days. No one's ever going to look back at these even one year from now, much less one thousand.
At the very far end of the road was the Josie Morris cabin.
Not nearly as ancient as the petroglyphs, Josie's cabin was inhabited by a woman who settled in the area in 1914. She lived there for fifty years, and then after she died, they decided to incorporate her frontier cabin into the monument.
It's a nice place. There's lots of big, shady trees, a natural spring running right through the property, and nice wide meadow, as well as the main cabin.
I thought it was pretty funny when we first got there, I was reading the sign that is posted right next to the spot where the spring burbles out of the ground. It said that it was likely that there was giardia in the water. When I loudly read the final words on the sign, "Protect yourself. Don't drink the water." I noticed my daughter's head snap up, and her eyes widen in alarm.
"You're not supposed to drink the water?" she asked.
"Nope," I said. "I'm guessing from your expression that you already did, though?"
She looked down, embarrassed.
"Well, it's too late now. I guess we just hope that you didn't get any giardia. If you have any problems, let me know, so we can get you to the doctor." I had to explain to her what giardia was, and she was none too pleased. Turns out she was fine. Solid as a rock, yeah.
After the cabin, it was time to head back to camp and make some dinner. A Daddy special, hot dogs and chips. Oh yeah, and a salad for our vegetarian.
The kids love it...or at least they tolerate it. Actually, my wife told me that they're not really fans, but who wants to spend a whole ton of time planning out and then cooking big special meals while camping? There's much higher priorities when camping.
Once we finished with dinner, we packed everything away until breakfast time, and then got back in the car. That's right, we weren't done yet. It was time for the thing I was most excited about, and the thing I was also the most worried about.
A lot of the national parks and monuments here are located in some of the most remote areas of the country. There's been a movement going on for the last several years to create places where you can actually see the stars. The International Dark Sky Association certifies places as Dark Sky Parks. All they have to do is change a few things to make the grade, like shielding their lights so that they only shine downwards. Dinosaur National Monument isn't an official Dark Sky Park, but Utah lists it as a Sanctuary of Natural Darkness whatever that means.
The coolest thing about all of this is that they have ranger programs at these dark sky places that are all about seeing the stars that you wouldn't normally be able to see. Before we left home, I found out on the internet that there would be a ranger program on the night that we would be camping there, and I was so excited to attend. Not only were they going to give you a sort of guided tour of the night sky, but there would also be several large telescopes there so that we could get a good look at things like Saturn and Mars.
However, there wouldn't be much of a program if it was raining, or even if the sky was just cloudy. So, as we drove toward Dinosaur, I was filled with a deeper anger and regret with each drop of rain that fell on my windshield. The rain went away, though. But that wasn't enough. The clouds had to go as well. I asked them at the visitor center, and they said there would be a ranger program even if there were clouds, there just wouldn't be any star gazing involved. I was not particularly interested in a star gazing party without star gazing. I wanted those clouds to go away.
And, miracle of miracles, they actually did all blow away, and as night fell, the stars began peeking out everywhere. We went to the program, and this photo was the best one I could get:
Yeah, it kind of leaves a lot to the imagination. I'm really itching to get a camera that has the option of leaving the shutter open for a longer period of time, but right now, I got nothing that can capture a picture of the stars. But it looked something like this picture that I found on the internet:
Seriously, it was amazing. It was my favorite part of the trip, and possibly my favorite thing that we've ever done at any national park or monument in all of our trips ever. I've always been a sci-fi space geek. I've always loved the idea of seeing and experiencing other worlds, stars, galaxies, and universes. When it comes down to it, this is the only way we can do so here on earth. Unless you're an astronaut, gazing at the stars and looking through telescopes is how we experience space.
It gives a new meaning to national parks, when you figure that they also include the whole universe of stars as well, but it's true. There's nowhere that you can see them better around here. They have a series of postcards for all the different parks out there, and my daughter has been collecting a lot of them. The phrase that they use is, "Half the Park Is After Dark," and it couldn't be more true.
Okay, well, that's enough of using other people's pictures for now, I guess. The stars were awesome, we saw Saturn, Mars, and the Andromeda Galaxy through telescopes, and then we went back to camp and went to bed.
That night, our air mattresses didn't stay pumped for us. It was really uncomfortable, and I was ready to get up pretty early, because it was better than laying there with my hips being jabbed by rocks and stuff. It's pretty upsetting, because the mattresses have been very reliable up until now, but this time two of the three went flat on us. I wonder what we did to cause it?
I went out and walked around, and saw tons of rabbits hanging out in the campground, just like the last time I took the kids camping and we went to the Colorado National Monument.
While the kids snoozed, I took some pictures of flowers, like always. This is the Rocky Mountain Bee Plant, which was all over the place in Dinosaur.
I rousted the kids out of bed, we had some breakfast, then went down to the river, which was right next to the campground, and we fished for a little while. I don't know why I bothered at all. It was as fruitless as any other attempt we've ever made at catching fish.
We probably came to the river too late; the kids slept in too much since they were up late looking at stars. It's like that saying "You can't soar with the eagles at dawn when you were hooting with the owls all night". But which is more fun, hooting or soaring? I suppose it depends on each person. I personally love stargazing a lot more than fishing, so I wasn't upset at all...well, I mean, I was upset with having to endlessly try to fix the kids' reels and stuff, but I wasn't upset, or even surprised, when we caught absolutely nothing.
We were glad to get back to the visitor center, and catch the shuttle bus up to the quarry. So, I just finished talking about how cool the ancient petroglyphs were because they're around 1,000 years old, but then we went to the dinosaur quarry and looked at bones preserved in rocks from the Mesozoic Era, between 66-245 million years ago.
Maybe I need to start etching blog entries into stone tablets or something like that. Then maybe they'll survive for whatever alien archeologists come to investigate our planet 245 million years from now. I bet they'd be really interested in what vacations were like for an utterly average and undistinguished twenty-first century man. You know, what flowers he liked to take pictures of and whether he caught any fish or not. That'll be some must read granite tablets.
Anyway, the quarry was cool. There were bones imbedded in this two (or three) story wall still, and the ones at ground level you were allowed to touch.
There were reassembled bones, probably actually replicas of bones that had been found, placed into displays so that they looked how they would have looked when archeologists discovered them.
These were cool, but you weren't supposed to touch them, just look this time.
They also had bones reassembled the way they would have been if there were a body surrounding the bones. You know, what you would usually see at a dinosaur museum.
Once we'd seen it all, we took a ride back down the hill in the shuttle bus. Back at the visitor center, we got Little's Junior Ranger badge, as well as some extra things they could get at this monument, namely the Junior Paleontologist badge and the Night Explorer patch that they earned at our ranger program the night before.
Then it was time to go home. Well, we could have stayed a while longer, but I was done. It was really hot, and packing up the tent in the heat and unshaded sun had taken a lot out of me, not to mention the poor sleep I got on our leaky air mattresses. I was ready to just go, the drive was around three hours, and I was going to drive the whole way, so I had to do it while I still had the energy to stay awake.
Interestingly, as soon as we hit the road, the rain began again, and it poured on us the whole way home. At least this time I didn't have to worry about camping in it anymore.
Oh, one last thing: they didn't have any patches at the visitor center; they had sold out of them. But they gave me the website for the people who supplied them, and I was able to order a patch for my collection from them. So, here's my newest addition, which I know you really wanted to see:
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