Dinosaur 2016

I'd never hiked in Dinosaur National Monument, and I'd never seen the famous Dinosaur Quarry there. I decided that it was time to rectify that error and scheduled a WMC trip there for Memorial Day.

I have driven past the amazing south wall of Split Mountain and wondered whether it would be equally cool up close. Surprise! It was.

I had a fantasy that I could scramble up to a gap in the wall and get an amazing view down to the Green River in the Split Mountain gorge. It may well be possible to do that, but it would take a full day of route finding. I have no regrets about turning around in time to visit the Dinosaur Quarry exhibit. (Now my fantasy is to camp at the Green River campground, start at 6 AM with just a couple of friends and head up the 5th major drainage east of the river!)

go to the South Split Mountain and the Dinosaur Quarry gallery

Sunday was an adventure.

We left camp on Blue Mountain at 8 AM and drove down the impressive Echo Park Road to the Yampa Bench, then headed west to Johnson Draw. We stopped on the way at some impressive viewpoints over the Yampa River and its classic sandstone gorge. We parked at the Baker Cabin and headed downstream. (I noticed a car parked along the road across the draw, and I wondered whether we would meet anyone on the hike, but we never did.)

There is a track that we were able to follow a lot of the time in the canyon. The track is mostly used by cows now, but I'm guessing that it was originally a horse or foot trail. (It starts a bit west of the Baker Cabin side road.)

After we reached the main section of Johnson Canyon, we soon found an alcove with pictographs and petroglyphs (and piles of cow poop). The canyon was cool and shady, with lots of box elders and cottonwoods. The bad news was that as the canyon got deeper and narrower, the brush got more obnoxious and it was more difficult to find the faint track.

We celebrated when we reached the Yampa gorge. It was full of cold brown water from the Rocky Mountains' spring melt. We visited some more pictographs along the river bank, then started back up the canyon. We were concerned that we might roast in the warm sun on the climb, but clouds moved in and shaded us. This weather made me a bit worried, though, and we zipped on back to the cars without any of my planned diversions. We got sprinkled on but there was no real rain, to my relief.

We headed back west toward Echo Park. Everything was fine until just after the Castle Park overlook. It was clear that a storm had passed through. I could hear mud splattering onto my fenders, and I crossed my fingers that the road was going to stay drivable.

But within a hundred yards, I completely lost control of my steering, even in 4WD with traction control. There was no way we were going to go forward; I carefully made a 3 point turn and headed back very slowly, hoping to intercept Stanley in his 4WD pick-up before he got in trouble.

Too late. Stanley's truck was spinning all 4 wheels with a locked differential, and he was in grave danger of sliding into a ditch. With some pushing from passenger Keith, he managed to get aligned so that he could do a 3-point turn by getting off the road on the high side, where the wet sand had better traction than the wet clay on the road.

I'm still cursing myself for not getting pictures... Gaah!

The only way out was to head east and hope that the rest of the Yampa Bench road was dry. Some of us were not looking forward to the section where the road runs along a ridge with drops on both sides, but it was (still) dry when we got there, and we made short work of it.

We passed the car that I had spotted from the Baker cabin. It turns out that it wasn't really parked on the side of the road; it had slid off of the road in the mud and gotten mired in a ditch. Ouch. The wheels were encased in solidified mud up to the hubs.

We finally made it back to camp at around 8:20 PM, just before dark. It turned out that the storm had raged through our campsite and blown over tents. There was now sticky mud everywhere, and it got cold quickly. We scarfed down snack food for dinner and crashed.

Did I mention that Sunday was an adventure?

go to the The Yampa Bench and Johnson Canyon gallery

A lot of people packed up and left early on Monday morning, hoping to get home and dry out. The few of us who were left decided to drive to the end of the paved road and hike to the Harpers Corner overlook. This high viewpoint doesn't quite have a view of the confluence of the Green and Yampa rivers (hidden behind a sandstone fin), but you get to see Whirlpool Canyon on the Green below the confluence, and a little bit of the lower end of Lodore Canyon on the Green above the confluence. The Yampa coils its way into the distance, an amazing sight.

go to the Harpers Corner gallery