A Western Diary X
Bill Long 6/27/05
The Dinosaur National Monument (Continued)
Thus, paleontologists scraped large sections of the 75' by 500' (or so) wall from 1909-24, removing hundreds of tons of bones, fossils and rubble and sending them back to their respective museums. They didn't explore the remaining section of wall, about 55' by 200', which was closed to all until the early/mid 1950's. The rest of the wall was then exposed in the mid-1950's, revealing about 1500-2000 dinosaur fossils. By the end of the 1950's the quarry had opened for public viewing, with a butterfly-wing-type roof design which enabled viewers to look at the amazing wall face from two levels. The nine types of dinosaurs found on the wall that visitors see, with their purported sizes, are as follows:
1. Diplodocus* 85' long and about 13 tons in weight.
2. Barosaurus* 80' long and about 25 tons in weight.
3. Apatosaurus* 75' long and about 34 tons in weight.
4. Camarasaurus* 60' long and about 30 tons in weight.
5. Allosaurus** 35' long and about 3 tons in weight.
6. Stegosaurus*** 25' long and about 5 tons in weight.
7. Ceratosaurus** 18' long and 2 tons in weight.
8. Camptosaurus*** 15' long and about 1500 pounds in weight.
9. Dryosaurus*** 6' long and about 150 pounds.
* designates a sauropod. ** is a theropod. *** is a ornithiscian.
Not only, then, do we have in one place the largest collection of dinosaur fossils in the world, but some of the best preserved dinosaur fossils (the juvenile Camarasaurus and a skull of an Allosaurus) were embedded in the wall [though the perfectly articulated juvenile Camarasaurus was on the section of the wall that was excavated from 1909-24, and is now in the Carnegie in Pittsburgh].
Creating a Monument
As word got out regarding this tremendous find, care had to be taken to guard the site against vandals and private treasure seekers. Douglass wanted to file a mining claim for the site, but was informed by the Interior Department that fossils were not considered minerals (an interesting conclusion), and so this strategy didn't work. Drawing upon recently passed federal legislation, supporters pushed President Wilson to recognize the area around the wall as a national Monument. On October 4, 1915, with WWI raging in Europe, President Woodrow Wilson set aside 80 acres as the Dinosaur National Monument. In his letter so designating the site, he talked about important finds from the "Juratrias Period" (Jurassic today) that should be preserved. In 1938 President Roosevelt set aside more than 204,000 additional acres, including huge sections of the Green and Yampa River valleys. The Monument now is largely in Colorado, while the Quarry is about 6 or 7 miles north of Jensen, UT.
Beyond the Quarry
After being amazed by the Quarry and what could be learned there, I was almost too overwhelmed to do anything but slink on to my motel in Vernal and contemplate what I had seen. But, when I left the parking lot, I decided to turn left onto Cub Creek Road and drive deeper into the Monument. There your eyes become attuned to different phenomena: interesting rock formations and, at the end of the road, the Josie Morris Cabin. I had to stop and take a long and deep look at Split Mountain, so named because the Green River, rather than wending its way around the mountain, goes right through the center of it. The irregular shape and strange greyish hue of the mountain gives it an eerie and forbidding appearance whenever you look at it; the spine of rocks up its "back" makes it look a little like a stegosaur.
Then there are the "Tilted Rocks," the "Turtle Rock," the "Elephant's Toe" and finally, Josie Morris' cabin. Described as similar to "melting Neopolitan ice cream" (which sure would have tasted good on a hot late June day), the "Tilted Rocks" have bands of color, grey and red and purple, running generally in a diagonal direction from upper left to lower right. You can almost see, in the layers of the colors, four "decks" of a listing ship, perhaps a ship which has struck a big rock and is sinking. And, isn't that the effect taht some of these fantastic rock shapes have on you? They inspire the imagination, making you compare what you see to what you know, and then bringing up a series of images associated with what you know to emblazon the rock before you deep on your mind. Nature, then, not only teaches by showing us layers of sediment or life in the Cretaceous or Jurassic periods, but it gently evokes our creative instincts by providing formations that inspire thought.
I will never forget a drive I took in 1993 with my then six-year-old son, William, through Central Utah on the way from KS to CA and OR. When seeing an arresting rock formation he said, in his six-year-old language, that it looked like little windows in the large plane we had flown on in the previous year. He wanted to know if there were people on the other side of these "windows." I saw then that the wonder of the rocks will touch a new generation.
Conclusion--The End of the Line
Most pople never make it to the end of the road because it turns to gravel and sends up all kinds of dust that gets your SUV or Ford Explorer or what Tom Wolfe calls your "Chrysler Annihilator," dirty. Yet at the end is a little cabin, tucked deep between the mountains, where a daughter of Northern Colorado pioneers lived by herself for fifty years until 1964, until at age 90 she apparently slipped while feeding her horse in the dead of winter, broke her hip and didn't recover from the injury (the brochure leaves it tantalizingly unclear whether she just died right there at her cabin or was actually rescued but died after receiving some medical care). The Monument staff has tried to romanticize her life there, with quotations from Thomas More's 16th century work Utopia, but it seems like her life probably had a modicum of connection with others (the Chew ranch was just down the road and her family lived just across the Colorado border a few miles away) as well as ample time for her own work and life.
All in all, the Dinosaur National Monument has given me images of life both past and present that are now always there, to be drawn upon as templates to help define and shape my understanding of the rest of the world. Not bad for an afternoon.
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Copyright © 2004-2007 William R. Long |