Best of the Southwest – Day 3 – Dinosaur National Monument

Vernal, Utah

We got a taste of the oven that was awaiting us when we sat down to dinner at Plaza Mexicana in downtown Vernal on our second night on the road. We had crossed the Ashley Mountains in a hail storm, checked into the Studio 6 Motel, and as our waitress brought us some cold Pacificos I looked up at the thermometer hanging by the door and it read 90 degrees. It was going to be whole new ballgame from here on out.

Vernal started out as a farming and ranching town. I have an old friend from my days at Grand Canyon who worked at Dinosaur National Monument. This was back in the mid-eighties, and he lived in Vernal for a few years. He affectionately referred to it as Urinal. These days it’s the regional economic hub of northeast Utah and the gateway to Dinosaur National Park. It has morphed into a pretty bustling place with big box store EVERYTHING! And there are life size amusement park dinos scattered up and down Main Street. It’s cheesy and goofy in a sort happy-go-lucky way and it’s impossible not to stop and snap a few photos.

Before heading over to Dinosaur we decided to spend a few hours exploring Vernal. Green River, Wyoming had taught us that there were some hidden gems in a lot of these Mormon towns. You just have to get out of your car and do some exploring. Otherwise, you will probably miss them.

We parked in the center of town along Main Street where all day parking was free and then we started walking around the town center.

We asked a few locals for the best place to eat breakfast and they all pointed to the nearby 7-11 Ranch Restaurant on Main Street. The inside of the barn-like restaurant was all cowboys and Indians and they served a mean breakfast with homemade jelly. I had the raspberry jam on their homemade Texas toast and it was out of this world.

The big tourist draw in Vernal turned out to be a really hokey-looking place in the middle of town called Dinosaur Land. Given that we would soon be hiking around Dinosaur National Park, where they showcased the fossilized remains of real dinosaurs, the idea of paying to see plastic replicas seemed absurd. For that same reason, we didn’t go into the world-renowned Field Museum of Natural History with it’s big, snarling Tyrannosaurus out in front. Vernal had clearly staked its future on the wonderful world of dinosaurs.

As were taking in the sights we came to a huge Veterans Memorial – every Mormon town has some sort of Veterans Memorial. This one was the biggest we would see on the trip. The centerpiece featured the standard soldier sculpture, surrounded by brass plaques, white marble tablets engraved with the names of the townsfolk killed in battle, all ringed by American flags. But it also had a green Huey helicopter gunship on stilts that was flown in Vietnam by a local pilot. That was pretty cool.

Sitting behind the memorial was the Heritage Museum right next to a pretty public park. We walked in expecting to pay and discovered that it was FREE! The place was amazing and we ended up spending over an hour checking it out.

Amazingly, there were no dinosaurs. The museum showcased what life in Vernal was like through the years. They recreated a mercantile store; the town’s old switchboard and teletype machine; purple glassware; military heroes; looted Indian artifacts; all things cowboy and horsey; the sturdy red safe from the Vernal Drug Company and soda fountain; the organ from the first Mormon temple; photographic equipment used by the town’s famous photographer Lou Thorne who chronicled the lives of the locals and Indians; early commercial river runners like Bus Hatch; a truly weird First Ladies of the White House doll exhibit, ending with Nancy Reagan (the lady who made the dolls died before the Clintons); odd landscape paintings; old wooden wheelchairs, typewriters, household appliances, furniture, pocket watches, musical instruments, and wood stoves; a barbershop; the steel door from the town jail; and, of course, lots and lots of guns. Each month they feature a special exhibit, like elaborate quilts made by the local ladies.

I really can’t say enough about these little museums in many of the larger Mormon towns. Museums is perhaps too highbrow a word to describe them. I’m sure that any curator at a fancy-pants museum would find them, at best, amusing, because they are for the most part just a curious assemblage of items that define life in their corner of the Beehive State. Many of the exhibits had been donated by local families. And a lot of the items were dusty and threadbare. But they were genuine. And in their own convoluted way, they tell some really important and truly touching stories.

There was an amazing abundance of hanging flower baskets and planters filled with purple petunias along the entire length of Main Street (and every other Mormon town we would travel through). They also had little brass interpretive signs that told interesting stories about the buildings of note. For instance, the bank building was built with bricks delivered in small boxes by the U.S. Postal Service. And it precipitated the national policy of charging for mail by weight. Up until that point there was just a standard fee for any package.

Dinosaur National Monument

It’s only about seventeen miles from Vernal to Dinosaur National Monument. US 40 East took us through Eden. Irrigation from the Green River has turned the high desert of northeastern Utah into lush fields of alfalfa, melons, and cow crops, their tall pivot pumps blasting rainbow spray into the air like money dropping from the sky. This vision of man made paradise extends south and west from Vernal for over 100 miles. I don’t know this for a fact, but from the looks of it, the Mormon farmers and ranchers were sucking the Green River aquifer dry like there was no tomorrow. Maybe they know something we don’t.

On August 28, 2017, the price of the America the Beautiful – The National Parks and Federal Recreational Lands Senior Pass increased for the first time since 1994. The additional revenue will be used to enhance the visitor experience in our federal parks.

The price of the America the Beautiful – The National Parks and Federal Recreational Lands Senior Pass increased as result of the Centennial Legislation P.L. 114-289 passed by the US Congress on December 16, 2016.

The Senior Pass had been $10 since 1994.

The lifetime Senior Pass has now increased from $10 to $80. The legislation states that the cost of the lifetime Senior Pass be equal to the cost of the annual America the Beautiful – The National Parks and Federal Recreational Lands Pass, which is currently $80.

The current passes are lifetime passes and will remain valid.

US citizens or permanent residents 62 years or older are eligible for the Senior Pass.

Annual and lifetime Senior Passes provide access to more than 2,000 recreation sites managed by six federal agencies:

National Park Service
US Fish & Wildlife Service
Bureau of Land Management
Bureau of Reclamation
US Forest Service
US Army Corps of Engineers

When we came to the entrance station at Dinosaur I purchased my lifetime Senior Pass with less than a week to spare.

As usual, our first stop was at the Visitor Center. We checked out the interesting interpretive exhibits and gift store and then watched an entertaining thirty minute movie about the history of the park.

The first monument was established in 1915 to protect the quarry and about eighty acres around it, but visitors and locals alike lobbied for the park to be expanded to include the nearby river canyons that had been carved by the Green and Yampa Rivers, and in 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt increased the monument’s size to over 210,000 acres.

After the movie we hopped on the FREE! shuttle for a five minute ride up the steep hill to the dinosaur bone quarry inside a brand new air conditioned glass building encasing the hillside where in 1909, Dr. Douglass from Carnegie Melon, in Pittsburgh, excavated over 1,500 dinosaurs that died 150 million years ago during the Jurassic Period after getting stuck in what was once a muddy river bend, but which now is a colossal sandstone mountain jutting up into the sky.

After returning to the Visitor Center we bought the Auto Guidebook for the Cub Creek Road for $1 and took the 24-mile Tilted Rock Scenic Drive. There were 15 stops and the best ones were: the Swelter Shelter Petroglyphs, Desert Voices Trail, Chew Ranch; Turtle Rock, and Elephant Toes Butte.

At the 11-mile mark the asphalt ended and things really started to get interesting, starting with an incredible rock art panel perched along the left side of Cub Creek Road. We decided to check it out.

And at this point the bad Steve emerged. The parking lot was pretty crowded and there were people milling about. For some reason, that pissed me off. So, I quickly got out of the car, grabbed a water bottle and headed for the top, following a dirt path right across from the parking area. Jimmy trailed slowly behind as I raced up the steep mountain. The path soon intersected with a spider web of dirt trails. And soon it was clear that I was bushwacking.

I said to myself, “The Parkies would never build such a half-ass trail.” And sure enough, as I neared the top I spotted the real trail – a chiseled super highway of a trail – leading easily to the top. But I had been in such a hurry to get away from the tourons, that I had not taken the time to find it, and chose instead to climb through cat claw bushes and loose rock. And poor Jimmy had a very hard time following my lead.

The panels had some amazing glyphs, including a big shiny lizard and Kokopeli the flute player jamming to his left.

The last stop was at Josie’s Cabin in the shadow of Split Mountain. Josephine Bassett Morris was larger than life – like something out of a movie like “True Grit”.

Josie settled at Hog Canyon Spring in 1914, after five crash-and-burn marriages. She raised and butchered cattle, pigs, chickens and geese. Her large garden provided her with vegetables and fruits. She had no electricity and heated her home with a wood burning stove. Her light came from an oil lamp. She was totally self-sufficient. She was also friends with the outlaw Butch Cassidy, and was accused (but never convicted) of rustling cattle.

Josie was a wily woman indeed and not to be trifled with. When she bumped heads with the Utah water laws that denied her the right to use the Hog Spring water on her own land because it drained into the larger Cub Creek, which another rancher had rights to, Josie found a loophole in the water rights law that would allow her to use Hog Springs as long as she made sure that it never reached Cub Creek. Josie’s property is dotted with dirt impoundments where she diverted the water away from Cub Creek.

In the winter of 1964, while feeding her horse, she slipped on some ice and broke her hip. She dragged herself into her home and waited for help. She had no telephone or any way to signal that she was dying. It was days before some friends from Vernal stopped by. As they were taking her to the hospital she said she had a feeling she would never see her beloved ranch ever again. And she was right. Josie died that spring at the age of 89.

We didn’t leave Dinosaur until three and we had more than a two hour drive to our motel in Price, Utah on a gorgeous but twisty highway. We broke up the drive by stopping in Roosevelt, Utah for an early dinner at the Frontier Inn which is right along UT 191 on the left. Jimmy and I both ordered the fruit salad with home made sherbert and fry bread. It’s easy to get into the burger routine when you are travelling and your only big meal of the day is dinner, so it was nice to eat healthy for a change.

In the little town of Duchesne, we missed our turn south and ended up adding another sixty miles to what was already a pretty grueling drive. The sign for UT 191 was obscured by a tree branch and was easy to miss. But I still felt like a putz.

After Duschesne, we left the green farm fields of the Green River Basin and headed up into the Manti-La Sal Mountains where mining rules the land. There were derricks dotting the landscape like a pincushion. It was getting dark and we were tired. The drive through the Manti-La Sal National Forest was a white-knuckler that seemed to go on forever before we finally dropped into the creepy shithole of Price, Utah, where all the ore that’s mined in the region is processed twenty-four hours a day. At night, it looked like Mordor in “The Hobbit”.

The big Mormon towns have all grown by leaps and bounds since my last visit in 2010. When I say grown, I mean they now have sprawling Walmarts and Home Depots, which, of course, have wrecked havoc on the mom and pop businesses in the smaller towns.

And for most of the little Mormon towns of northeast Utah the past is prologue. It’s guns, hunting, high school football, and Jesus. Folks seem happy and satisfied. Progress is measured by the passing of seasons. And it’s “Ground Hog Day” forevermore.