Arrival at Dinosaur National Monument

Funny thing about writing a blog. You either have very little to write about and lots of time to write or you are doing lots of interesting things and taking lots of cool pictures, but have no time to write about it. The past few weeks has been more like the later. I will try to catch up, but the area we are in is just awesome and we want to see all of it before we head on.

On Sunday, August 28, we left Yampa State Park and made the drive to Green River Campground in Dinosaur National Monument. We had been to DNM in the past and just remembered seeing some dinosaur bones stuck in the rock inside a big building. It was kind of interesting, but not something that would just blow you away. All I can say is, We missed it!

As we drove along the high dessert of far North West Colorado, we saw some large rocks in the distance. At first they just looked different and interesting. As we got closer they looked amazing.

Here we are coming into Utah with those amazing rocks in the distance.

Soon we came to the town of Jensen and crossed over the Green River. We had no idea, how much more we would be seeing of that river. Soon we came to the entrance to the NM.

There are multiple entrance points to Dinosaur NM. This is the most southern one, that is closest to Vernal, Utah. We went through the gate and had forgotten that this weekend was a free weekend. We didn't even have to show our pass to get in. We drove just a few miles and could immediately see many very interesting rock formations and ridges. Most of the area is very arid dessert except the area right along the river. When we dropped down to the campground I knew Kim was going to like this one. The views were amazing.

We drove the loop and saw that there are two loops one is reservable and the other is first come/first served. We actually liked the FCFS loop better. There were plenty of open sites in both loops. We found site 3 would work great for us and it was right along the river. We fit easily. We had no OTA TV, good 4G Verizon, no hookups for $18 per night. We traveled with a full tank of water, but they do have water in the campground, but they are those stupid kind that is difficult to hook to a hose. We were only staying 3 days, so no problem for us.

As the evening came the lighting changed, but just enhanced the beautiful rocks.

Very interesting sunset

The one thing I couldn't take a picture of was the amazing stars. This place is very dark and we sat out each night and watched for shooting stars. That is very abnormal for us to sit out that much, but this place just called you outside.

We had dropped down to almost 5000 feet elevation, so it was a bit warmer than Yampa, but the nights we around 50, so perfect sleeping weather.

I got up early on Monday ready to explore. I first walked around to take a few pictures.

I thought these flowers looked interesting:

We drove up to the overlook and could easily see our trailer right in the middle of this shot:

One more shot of that amazing ridge.

I am going to end this entry there. We were energized to get out and see as much of this wonderful place as we could. Come back to see what hiking and paddling and other sight seeing we did.