I woke up from the sun burning onto my tent. Climbing out I wasn’t sure if I had ended up on Mars but …

… soon I remembered I was in the US.

The storm from the previous day had not returned and the weather was just perfect. Once more I was alone on the road save for the odd antelope here and there. One was about the cross the road in front of me but luckily changed it’s mind. There was an abundance of wildlife on this barren patch of land. I also saw vultures and a variety of rodents.

Finally, after a few hours in the sun I reached the state of Utah. Known for it’s high dinosaur density and geological predestination for findings. It seems however dinosaurs don’t like the heat which is unfortunate since part of the reason to come here was to see some dinosaurs but who can blame them after what happened a few million years ago with that big fireball and all that.

Instead I found the first signs of what can reveal their remains in this area. A massive broken fold of rock sticking out of the ground showing layer upon layer of time preserved.

The incredible scale was mind blowing. Millions of tons of rock folded up like a piece of cloth over millions of years. A very humbling sight.

The closer you get the more difficult it usually becomes to recognize a pattern but this was as obvious as it gets even at close range.

If only I had more time to admire these keepers of time. The complete silence and solitude would have made it easy to spend a full day marveling at nature.

An hour later I found a little road leading to another imposing sight. A giant canyon with a steep drop off.

Once more I had to force myself to get going again.

I followed a road that led me down into a wide basin, my goal for the day. It was a narrow winding road with a steady not too steep incline. Still it was enough to turn trucks into unstoppable cannon balls in case of a brake failure which is why at any long enough straight there was a long strip of deep gravel branching off the main road so that trucks could speed into them to slow down. I would have paid to see a truck undertake such a maneuver but luckily I didn’t see any. The tracks in the pits however showed that had I waited long enough eventually I would have seen such a show.

The view onto the basin was spectacular. There were stacked layers of rock breaking out of the surface as far as the eye could see. Ideal for dinosaur findings.

I entered a small town called Vernal that housed a dinosaur museum and was clearly dinosaur themed. The museum was supposed to be a very extensive collection but I didn’t want to see bones in a museum which I have seen many times before, I wanted to see where they were from. Of any locations in the world this was the place to do that. Before getting some gas and stopping to eat a big pizza at a Seven Eleven which was actually very good I found another dinosaur of it’s class. A Bell Cobra from the Vietnam War that had been flown by a local pilot.

Despite this being dinosaur country I still didn’t know how close I was to finding them. As distances are great here I was worried I may not find any traces of dinosaurs close enough for my limited schedule. I only had today to track them down. But after talking to some locals I found out that my goal was just a little outside of Vernal.

Somehow I expected a place like this to have a circumstantially boring or scientific name but I had arrived at Dinosaur National Monument. This aught to be good.

After paying the fee for the park it soon became clear where I had ended up.

Welcome to Jurassic Park. The real one. Cue the music.

There was a little train that brought people into the park. Spared no expense.

Of course they also had those jeeps you see in the movie. (Don’t let that Park Ranger look fool you, clearly this is just a disguise.)

If we have learned anything from Jurassic Park it’s not to get out of the vehicle but I wanted to see the dinosaurs up close.

I was rewarded with a monumental sight at huge dinosaur graveyard. A big fold of rock was covered by a hangar like building and allowed a view at an unbelievable amount of dinosaur bones that were still half stuck in the rock. There were dozens of dinosaurs in the same layers. If I recall correctly the science behind it is that over time they were all washed up to a certain spot at a river bend where they accumulated and eventually were covered in sediment and preserved just so they could be discovered millions of years later almost precisely (in a cosmic timescale) as I walked by.

This was exactly what I had come for. The whole site almost seemed fake so perfectly were the bones preserved and the shapes recognizable.

I was surprised at how casual the whole location was managed. There was only one person at the quarry, a military historian who answered and explained the science behind the bones in a very military like Q&A fashion. Unfortunately he could not answer my question as to why one side of this gigantic bone below was missing. The bone doesn’t look fractured so we speculated that maybe a geological shift had transported the rest of the bone away or it wasn’t stuck in the right kind of material and rotted before it could fossilize.

The quarry also had one of the best preserved Allosaurus skulls found so far.

A nice little diagram explained how dinosaur remains are being revealed to us. Dinosaurs die and get covered in layer upon layer of sand and other materials that over time become rock. Pressure from below might then push upwards thus breaking these cake layers and together with erosion this process can reveal old layers which in other spots might still be deep under the ground hiding more secrets for later generations to discover.

Today there was more to be discovered on a little trail leading back to the entrance.

As trivial as it my be I have always wanted to touch a dinosaur bone and this was it. Certainly a highlight of my trip so far.

Soon followed by roughly 2000 year old drawings on a rock. Again it baffled me that this was not at least protected behind a glass wall. No alarms for getting too close. No suspicious security guard eyeing you up. Personally I find art like this more important and worth protecting than art like this ($140mio.) and this ($75mio.) but what do I know.

Back at the main building looking for hydration I found it very admirable that this vending machine stocked almost exclusively water and there was a free water fountain right next to it too.

Exhausted from this excursion in the park I began looking for opportunities to camp nearby.

I decided to just take it slow and drive around a little bit and see if I could find an empty space. As during dinosaur time there weren’t many trees to hide a tent as the landscape was mostly barren rocks like this one that was just another layer slowly pushing out of the ground. Luckily though this time I would not have to worry about bears so anywhere would be fine.

Eventually I did find a camp site and after wrestling my tent to the ground I went to bed before it was dark so I could get up early the next morning for another highlight.