Dinosaur National Monument may be famous for the absurd amount of dinosaur fossils that have been discovered on these grounds, but the amount of geology on display here was a really pleasant surprise.

The entire area is spackled with different colored rocks. They create colorful bands that slice through the rolling stone. Each mountain seems to have a different texture and structure, evidence to the sheer variety of geology on display here. Dinosuar National Monument loves to remind you that it has more layers of geological history on display than even the Grand Canyon. 

When new layers of earth are applied, over time, they build up on top like layers of paint. As time moves on, the layers are made up of different stuff, depending what was on the surface at the time (perhaps an ocean, a swamp, or desert for example.)  Well here, at the border of Colorado and Utah, the layers were pushed up creating a sort of Rainbow of rock layers so instead of needing to dig down to see each layer we need only to walk along the surface. If you can imagine, as we hiked horizontally through the rainbow passing from color to color, we are passing through the different ages of geologic history. For a short while you may be within one formation and the rocks are covered in small clam like fossils, after a quarter of a mile you might make your way through the Jurassic period where the fossils become much larger and you see a brontosaurus leg sticking out from the canyon edge. If you continue you will reach the Cretaceous period and see more fish like and plant fossil. This continues for 24 distinct layers and Amy wanted to see and read about them all. We agree to return the instant that the kids are old enough to raft down the entire canyon. 

After spending the morning at some hot springs in Steamboat Springs we arrived late in the afternoon under the direct desert sun. 99 degrees, by far, our hottest day yet. We found a spot in the campground under some large cottonwood trees then cooled off swimming in the Green River while Amy told us stories documented in Powell’s journal from when he first explored here. In the early morning, we hiked through the layers of the proverbial geology rainbow before the sun became overbearing. 

The real star is the Dinosaur Quarry, a very unique area discovered that contains an unmatched concentration of dinosaur bones. At some point there was a large drought leading to a mass die-off of many large dinosaurs. The weather here was perfect for large rains to push these bones down stream where they eventually all jammed up creating a preserved wall of dinosaur bones. Andrew Carnegie funded many of the excavations here in the early days and many of the most impressive fossils discovered here we have actually seen on display in Pittsbugh, at the Carnegie Museum Of Natural History.

What a strange part of the planet this is.