As we were creating our driving route from Cheyenne, Wyoming, to West Haven, Utah, to visit our friends, we thought we’d make a loop across eastern Utah, catch up with our friends, and then circle back across Wyoming on our way home.

Along our path we discovered Dinosaur National Monument, which straddles the border of eastern Utah and western Colorado.

The park … is on the edge of the Uinta Basin. Its riches include the namesake Jurassic fossils, multi-hued canyons, and two rivers. Over one billion years, geologic lifting, warping, and erosion created a surprising, varied landscape where many plant and animal species thrive and the remains of ancient life can be seen.

We woke up early the first day of our trip and drove to Green River, Wyoming, where we traveled south along the Flaming Gorge National Recreation area to Vernal, Utah, for the night. The next morning we spent a half-day exploring the national monument.

Because it’s early spring, several of the main roads were inaccessible due to snow. This helped us narrow down how we spent our time since we only had a few hours. After talking through our options with the rangers at the visitor center, we decided to focus our visit on exploring the Quarry Exhibit Hall, hiking the Fossil Discovery Trail, driving to Split Mountain, and checking out the petroglyphs near the Josie Morris Cabin (which was the open road’s turnaround point).

Near the Quarry Visitor Center at the Utah entrance to the national monument is the Quarry Exhibit Hall. The hall was built around a massive wall of bones that is an active dig site. One of the leaders of the team that originally discovered the fossils in this area had the forethought to request this building be constructed around a portion of their dig site so people can experience the 149-million-year-old fossils up close. Completed in 1958, the Quarry Exhibition Hall is still serving that purpose today.

The Quarry Exhibit Hall is where you can see a wall of approximately 1,500 dinosaur bones. This includes the remains of numerous species, such as Allosaurus, Apatosaurus, Camarasaurus, Diplodocus, and Stegosaurus. Exhibits, including an 80 foot (24 m) long mural, reveal the story of the many animals that lived in the Morrison environment during the Late Jurassic. 

From the quarry parking lot, we caught the Fossil Discovery Trail that connects the visitor center with the exhibit hall. We were told the trail was closed to through hiking due to construction but we could hike the section near the exhibit hall and see some fossils ‘out in the wild.’

It was nice to stretch our legs and the trail had a few nice viewpoints, but overall I didn’t find the hike super interesting. The weather wasn’t great and we struggled to identify many fossils in the surrounding landscape. The outdoor wall shown below did have one white arrow pointing to what appeared to be a partial vertebrae, but other than that I think we were seeing a lot of clams and other unidentified sea creatures rather than apparent dinosaur remains.

While many people come to Dinosaur National Monument for the namesake fossils, we were actually quite impressed by the petroglyphs (chipped or carved into the rock) and pictographs (painted on the rock) created by the Fremont people who lived in this area about 1,000 years ago.

We stopped at a number of pull offs to hike to nearby examples – primarily of petroglyphs – in the sandstone cliffs, including at Swelter Shelter, Cub Creek, and the Petroglyph areas along the gravel road to the Josie Morris Cabin. I was amazed at how many there were and how clearly you could see them.

The standout experience was finding the lizard petroglyph featured in the park materials. We saw a sign about lizard figures and assumed that was the place.

No sooner had we gotten out of the car than I spotted the main one way up on the cliff. It was HUGE! As we climbed the trail up to the cliff more and more lizards came into view, but the largest one was so clear on the darkened stone and unlike any we’ve seen.

I tried to take a photo with Brian for scale – normal-size lizards next to him and the one that is nearly as big as him overhead.

It was almost noon when we finished with the lizards and we needed to get on the road to Salt Lake City. There was tons more to see in the national monument – more drives, hikes, another visitor center, even opportunities to raft or boat along the Green River that runs through a large portion of this area.

Given it’s so close to our home, I hope we’ll be back in slightly warmer weather to experience another side of the park and the activities that weren’t accessible during our visit. Until next time!