cold, wet, cold, wet...Ice Lakes Basin

Ice Lakes Basin - San Juan National Forest, Colorado - July 2017

It wasn't easy pulling myself away from my campsite overlooking the South Stillaguamish River. It seemed almost perverse. Why was I giving up a well-shaded spot overlooking a river complete with white noise riffles when that is basically all I ever really wanted? Sure I had to give up that site, it was reserved for the weekend. But I know plenty of such spots in the Cascades and if I tried I could probably have one every night all summer. Instead I was driving away, a thousand miles away, to a place where I didn't know such spots, and I was questioning my judgement.

Driving south on I-5, the flat white face of Mount Baker further taunted me in my rear view mirror. I wouldn't be seeing any more glacier-draped stratovolcanoes once I left the Cascades. But Puget Sound traffic stepped up to help ease the pain of departure. I crawled down I-405, a road I don't believe I've ever driven without being stuck in traffic. Then two lanes were closed on I-90 approaching Snoqualmie Pass, making for more stop-and-go driving amid a raft of rigs. Finally free along the Yakima River, I ripped the bandage off quickly so to speak, driving hard (for me) three straight days, camping along the way at a hot buggy Oregon state park along the Snake River; in a fragment of the Sawtooth National Forest in Idaho not large enough to offer bears; and finally along a creek off Mirror Lake Highway in Utah's High Uintas, where I stayed three nights and got in a hike on the 10,000 foot Highline Trail to Naturalist Basin.

Naturalist Basin

Two more days driving got me to my destination – South Mineral Creek Campground in south west Colorado's San Juan Range. For the historical record, the date was July 19.

On my first and only previous visit to the San Juans eight years earlier, I went on three tremendous hikes and left feeling like I had only scratched the surface. My goal for this summer was to take the time to get to know the area a lot better, but alas it didn't work out that way. I did spend more time there, almost a month, but most of that was waiting out the weather and then venturing out in the face of monsoon storms. The previous time, also in July, I enjoyed a series of clear sunny days and I blithely assumed that this was just the way it was. The Sierras are sunny and dry in summer, the Cascades are mostly sunny and dry in summer, I guess I figured the Colorado Rockies were as well. In fact I had hit an usually dry and sunny summer that year and this year I hit an unusually stormy one. Not that I mind hiking in the rain, at least part of the time. But if I have a choice I go for sunny, especially above treeline.

South Mineral Creek Campground sits at 9800', across the road from the trailhead to Ice Lakes Basin, one of those three great hikes I had been longing for years to get back to. The campground cost $25! - a Forest Service high, with pit toilets no less – but it has no trouble filling. I got the last remaining site around noon on a Wednesday. It was in fact a shady site almost overlooking Mineral Creek, but I had to spend most of my campground time in my tent as the campground was very buggy - flies and mosquitoes simultaneously; usually they take shifts. The only reprieve came when it rained, so it was either raining or bugging my entire two weeks there. I enjoyed it though, reading in my camp chair, tent windows open catching the breeze, every so often venturing out to eat and enjoy the lovely views.

view from campsite

On the first sunny morning I headed out the Ice Lakes Basin trail, its jammed parking area reflecting its popularity. It is a fairly steep ascent through a nice forest for 10-11,000 feet, the subalpine zone said my nature guide, featuring “dense forests of Engelmann Spruce and subalpine fir” with “lush meadows, ponds, and various types of wetlands”. While the trees weren't that large, the forest had the complexity of old-growth, and where it gave way to slopey meadows, flower outbursts provided a hint of what was to come higher up.

The trail levels out as it enters lower Ice Lakes Basin, an expanse of wet meadows broken up by scattered stands of conifers, a sea of green contained by walls of gray-black rock interspersed with (green) meadowy slopes. Both retained prominent snow patches with innumerable waterfalls pouring down. Upon closer look, the wet meadows fostered fields of wildflowers stunning in both their volume and height. This lower basin would be a highly rewarding destination in its own right but the tips of peaks peeking above the rocky walls promised greater scenes to come. Those waterfalls were coming from somewhere.

Lower Ice Lakes Basin

Flores sarrantoniea

The trail across the lower basin crosses a creek that required wading. A bit of a bottleneck formed as people scouted routes and strategies. Some went barefoot but I went forth in my boots, almost making it with only wet tops but slipping once and taking in half a bootful. The (air) temperature was mild so the wet foot was not a problem, and in any event the afternoon was shaping up to be a rainy one. The sun had shined while I climbed through the forest, clouds were amassing as I crossed the lower basin, and the rain began just as I started the steep ascent toward the upper basin. I sat awhile to rest and enjoy the views back out over the lower basin, as well as to yield to the streams of people pouring back down the trail. It seemed as if the upper basin had been evacuated, and it almost had. By the time I finished my ascent I found it largely deserted.

what's your strategy?

Lower Ice Lakes Basin

Upper Ice Lakes Basin is a real showstopper and the highlight comes right away: turquoise Upper Ice Lake, sitting at 12,250’ against a background of near vertical green meadows forming a basin Upper Ice Lakes is a real showstopper and the highlights start right away: turquoise Upper Ice Lake, sitting at 12,250 feet enclosed by near vertical green meadows rising up to a long curving ridge of jagged red volcanic pinnacles rising another 1500 feet - Vermillion Peak (13,894 feet), Golden Horn (13,780 feet), Pilot Knob (13,738 feet) - all “carved from rhyolite ash-flow tuff”. The rock is crumbly, and rocky avalanche chutes spilled down the steep cliffs. In 2009 this green, turquoise, red, and white extravaganza was topped of by whirling white clouds in a blue sky, creating an alpine phantasmagoria. This time I got muted ground colors amid a dark gray sky. It was cold up, which was why most of the others had fled, but I donned my woolen hat and woolen sweater beneath my rain jacket and was able to enjoy a comfortable and very solitary stroll a mile or so to Fuller Lake.

Upper Ice Lake

Upper Ice Lake

Fuller Peak

Of course the sun came out as I descended through the forest.

2)

The next few days were very wet and the forecast called for more of the same for at least two weeks if not for all of eternity. The typical monsoon pattern is erratic, but predictably erratic. Mornings are sunny with clouds rolling in by noon, usually building to thunderstorm capacity, maybe or maybe not delivering a downpour, after which comes clear and lovely evenings. Instead we had days that were almost entirely gray with intermittent light and heavy rains. Even the locals expressed begrudging surprise.

So when another clear morning came around I went for it. I had planned on taking a different hike but that one entailed a half-hour drive and a longer ascent and I figured the weather wouldn't give me that kind of time. I was still camped at the Ice Lakes Basin trailhead and since I hadn't really seen it all that great the first time, I went back. The sunshine lasted longer this time but not by a whole lot. Some blue sky remained when I got to the upper basin, but much of the sky was clouding up and thunder was rolling somewhere in the not very far off distance.

Upper Ice Lake

Up through the forest I had played trail leapfrog with a mother and two children, a 12-year old boy and a 14-year old girl or thereabouts. They had eventually surged ahead and were standing by the lake when I arrived, the boy having gone for a very quick dip into Ice Lake let's hear it for prepubescence. The woman and I discussed the oncoming storm. Like most others, she was taking a quick look at the basin and then heading right back down. She said the last time she was there the ranger was encouraging people to take their pictures and leave, spending as little time in the basin as possible. And that had been on a clear day.

I had already decided I wasn't going to do that. The hike up was too strenuous and the basin too enticing to just come and go like that. On my first visit to the Rockies I followed conventional wisdom, starting my hikes at dawn in order to be off the peak or high ridge by noon. I have nice pictures of these hikes but few memories, as I stumbled through them half-brain dead from lack of proper sleep. And each time as I descended in early afternoon, hikers would be ascending the trail into the face of gathering clouds. Obviously not everyone followed orthodoxy, and I never read of crowds being annihilated on mountaintops that summer.

This time I wasn't going to be cowed. I was not a mother with two children in tow. I was essentially alone – no dependents, no one home waiting, not even a home home waiting. Certainly I have loved ones who would grieve, but they could console themselves by saying 'at least he died doing what he loved best', which would certainly contain some degree of truth. Not that I thought I would get struck by lightning. If I did it would be a fluke and not something I was going to cower in my tent in order to avoid. The basin is beautiful and expansive and I was going to explore it. If it was going to be lightning, then lightning it would be.

On this, my third foray into Ice Lakes Basin, I wanted to explore the one section I hadn't yet tried, up a small steep drainage that would afford me, I surmised, a closer look than I'd yet had to what I took to be Pilot Knob. From there I hoped I could drop down to Fuller Lake and return the way I had hiked the last time. Clouds and thunder, blue sky and sunshine were battling it out overhead as I plodded upward slowly and prudently. When the dark clouds and thunder began to take the upper hand, I faced a dilemma. I didn't want to continue climbing into a storm, but I didn't want to retreat in the face of ephemeral thunder either, so I compromised by sitting down to see what might unfold. This proved a happy strategy in that I could use the rest and it was a lovely spot.

In the distance I could see hikers emerge at the mouth of the basin, linger a bit around Ice Lake then retreat back down the trail, giving way to newcomers in a constant ebb and flow. I didn't see anyone venture beyond the lake. I seemed to be the only one in the basin that afternoon. Still, I felt relatively confident. I was surrounded by peaks far taller than I. If the storm struck I would just make myself small.

The weather stabilized a bit so I resumed my slow ascent toward my destination cirque. Not only was the cirque surrounded by snow, it held an icy tarn complete with icebergs, not bad for mid-July at this latitude. The basin was also littered with remains from a mining camp, including an intact metal bed with springs. I could also now see Pilot Knob in its entirety and it was oddly unimpressive, like its lower portion was not yet finished. Of course the gigantic talus slope at its feet demonstrated it was actually falling apart, apparently from the bottom up.

The weather, and ok this is a story about the weather, had grown surreal. I was now baking in a hot sun even as half the sky had turned an ornery purple. I continued up the cirque, figuring that if things got bad I could quickly retreat the way I came. I crossed a scree slope of intensely shattered rock, then climbed a snowfield up the cirque wall. An elaborate cairn high on the basin rim suggested I was headed somewhere worth heading, and from the cairn I spotted what looked to be a large and extremely well-positioned climbers shelter. Those purple clouds were closing in on me and what I should have done was stop and don my woolens. But instead I bee-lined toward the promise of shelter, a promise that proved illusory. The shelter was no such thing. It was the foundation for what had presumably been a miners shack, its insides an unwelcoming pile of rotting boards and persevering nails.

"Up where newborn clouds rise over open rock"

The storm was now upon me. Rather than lightning it delivered a howling horizontal hail that pelted me as I stripped down to my t-shirt long enough to don my wool sweater and cap, this at nearly 13,000 feet. In those few moments something strange occurred. A voice from deep within me that I had never heard before started chanting the words “cold, wet, cold, wet, cold, wet”. I later wondered whether this was the first time I'd so flirted with hypothermia that my central nervous system felt it needed to have its say. I also considered that maybe I was just being influenced by the book I was reading - Being a Beast, by Charles Foster - in which the author tried to get into the mind of wild animals, “cold, wet, cold, wet” being the sort of way he'd have them think. A subconscious affectation? I didn't think so. It felt primordial to me.

I wasn't really in much danger as once I got all my clothes back on I was safe and warm. I'd like to say the sun came out at that very moment but all I can say is the hail reverted to rain and the wind diminished appreciably. I reached the high point of the ridge where my simple calculations said I should be able to look down over the far edge and see Fuller Lake and sure enough there it was. I love that. But I was a lot higher above the lake than I'd reckoned - I'm not sure why I was surprised since I'd been climbing steadily for at least an hour – and the descent to the lake was not quite the easy stroll I'd bet on.

Fuller Lake

First I decided to cross a talus slope toward a nicely down-curving ridge, but eventually found the drop from the talus to the ridge was steep and risky. So I doubled back across the talus to descend the next best alternative, a steep snowfield. The snow was soft and relatively safe with the help of some step-cutting, though large snow cups complicated footing. It's easy to wrench a knee stumbling around in soft snow like that. Plus falling made my hands cold. But rather than put on my gloves I committed myself to being careful not to fall anymore, and almost succeeded, slipping once more at the bottom but sliding safely off the snow.

This left only a descent on tundra to the lake. The rain had grown light enough to allow me to relax and have fun with snow reflections. Then the wet stroll back back to Ice Lake, very marshy, very picturesque, hands warm in pockets, thunder increasing and becoming closer than it had been all day. One camping couple packed up their tent and fled.

The sky was brightening as I left the upper basin and I decided that the sun was about to break out over the entire lower basin. That would have been a beautiful sight so I stopped and rested in anticipation. It didn't happen but the rain did let up and the walk through the chin-high flowers of the lower basin was divine.

The place was nearly deserted. I did cross paths with a young woman who had broken the heel on her (not very appropriate) boots and we exchanged our delight with the entire situation. The sun finally did emerge, once again shining its light on peaks as I returned down the forest, and I completed my hike feeling better than I had in quite some time. Maybe ever. Back at the campground the flies and mosquitoes greeted me with enthusiasm. Clearly they were glad I'd made it back alive.

Even the Losers...Dinosaur National Monument

Dinosaur National Monument - Utah and Colorado - May 2017

1)

The primary attraction of Dinosaur National Monument, the reason for the park's initial protection and the reason most people visit, is the Dinosaur Quarry Exhibit Hall. Here the National Park Service houses what remains of “the single most important Jurassic dinosaur paleontological site to be found anywhere.” In August 1909, a young paleontologist by the name of Earl Douglass made a significant discovery on this spot: eight tail bones of a dinosaur now known as Apatosaurus, set in the exact position they were in when the animal was alive. Further digging uncovered nearly the entire skeleton, the most complete Apatosaurus ever discovered. And this was just the beginning. Over the next several years, intense excavation at the site unearthed bones from 400 individual dinosaurs representing 14 different species.

While the excavation didn't produce significant new discoveries, what it produced, other than abundance, was quality. These were some of the most complete and best preserved specimens of their type, perfect for both study and display. Some 350 tons of bones were shipped off to museums, mostly to Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh which sponsored the excavation, including 20 skeletons complete enough to be mounted.

These dinosaurs lived about 150 million years ago, well before the time when dinosaurs went extinct some 65 million years ago. They represent just a day in the life near the midway point of the 160 million years the Dinosaurs lived on earth. Paleontologists have concluded that these particular animals had lived along a large river and that a drought had forced them to gather closely around a dwindling water source. Many died there, and seasonal floods swept both living and dead down to a tight bend in the river, where they were hung up, quickly buried in mud, gradually pushed deep into the ground where they remained intact until mountain building lifted them back up above the surface. Finally erosion slowly removed the overlying rock layers so that there they were, in the early 20^th century, lying there waiting for the right aspiring dinosaur bone hunter to come along. I find the whole thing very mind-boggling.

In 1915, at the request of the Carnegie Museum, President Woodrow Wilson declared 80 acres around the excavation site a national monument in order to protect the remaining fossils from looters or homesteaders. By 1922, Carnegie decided it had all the dinosaur bones it needed, and while Douglass kept at it for a couple more years on behalf of the Smithsonian Institute, work at the Dinosaur Quarry soon went into hiatus for more than twenty-five years. Excavation kicked back into gear in the 1950s, and in 1958 the Park Service erected a building around the site and allowed people to come in and watch as paleontologists went about their work. But by the early 1990s Quarry production had reached diminishing returns and excavation shifted elsewhere in the monument, where paleontologists could find fossils of smaller animals that had lived alongside the dinosaurs. As for the Quarry, the park service left more than 1,500 fossilized bones from 100 dinosaurs on display for public perusal, the bones half-excavated, lying essentially as they were buried some 150 million years ago.

I've never had any interest in dinosaurs, never even saw Jurassic Park, but I was certainly ready to go take a look at a world class dinosaur exposure right under my nose. It was a strange sight. A wall of rock 150-feet long and two stories high, tilted up at a sharp angle, a geological happenstance that makes for great viewing. Bones of all sizes and shapes were strewn about, open-face as it were. One guidebook compared it to “the leavings of an enormous turkey dinner”, but after examining it for a while I felt like I was looking at exactly what I was looking at, an enormous mass grave. I get it. People with greater interest than I can use their binoculars and identify the various bones. But it left me feeling bereft.

On the other hand, the small museum accomplished what a museum is supposed to, it piqued my interest. In about 45 minutes I learned more than I'd ever known about dinosaurs, though probably not so much as your average seven-year old already knows. In fact I went back a second time to review the museum displays and did not even look at the bones in the wall. The great majority of the buried dinosaurs were sauropods, which means, I learned, long-necked dinosaur. An adult sauropod weighed 25 tons, the largest animals ever to walk on earth. They were herbivores, and very numerous. The single-most represented dinosaur at Dinosaur Quarry is a sauropod named Camarasaurus, one of which remains to this day the most complete sauropod dinosaur skeleton ever found anywhere.

The Quarry also yielded enormous numbers of Stegosaurus bones - a familiar looking dinosaur with rows of plates on its back and spikes along its tail - so many that Douglas complained they were in his way when he worked to unearth his Apatosaurus. In 1977 the Quarry yielded the most complete juvenile Stegosaurus ever found. Another herbivore, Stegosaurus is an Ornithischian, which I guessed might refer to its armor but in fact means “bird-like hips”. Not all Ornithischians are armored, or herbivores.

Stegosaurus model outside Visitors Center

I knew you wanted to see this face

The Quarry also yielded meat-eating dinosaurs, called Theropods, though in lesser numbers as is typically the case with predators. The Quarry yielded the bones of the Allosaurus, a ferocious predator that walked on hind legs, and the museum displayed a real Allosaurus skull in a glass case. Bones in glass cases didn't bother me. Just the ones strewn about the wall.

Allosaurus skull 

Rarely afraid to show my ignorance, I asked the ranger on duty some questions. What about the Brontosaurus, one of the most well known dinosaurs as far as I knew but one that a seven-year old friend of mine summarily dismissed when I brought it up in conversation? Was that just something they made up for the Flintstones? Not at all, she answered. In fact the question turned out to be relevant to the Dinosaur Quarry. When Earl Douglass found the Apatosaurus skeleton that launched the Dinosaur Quarry he called it a Brontosaurus. But he was just a little out of date. Some thirty years earlier, the two leading paleontologists of the day had made similar sauropod discoveries. Edward Cope named his discovery the Apatosaurus and O.C. Marsh named his the Brontosaurus. This was just one of the issues Cope and Marsh faced off on as they waged a poisonous public feud about nearly everything for the entirety of their careers. In 1902 some scientific authority concluded the two animals were the same species, and since Cope had named his first, Apatosaurus became the scientifically accepted name. Brontosaurus was relegated to mere popular nomenclature. Recently though, some paleontologists have begun to press the case that Brontosaurus was a legitimate separate species and so the question is back up for grabs, hopefully in a more civil manner.

Emboldened, I pressed on. How about Tyrannosaurus Rex? Was that for real? Yes indeed. But it did not evolve for several tens of millions of years after the demise of the Dinosaur Quarry dinosaurs. In fact the Tyrannosaurus was around about the time the dinosaurs went extinct. I realize I could be the last person in the world to know this. But I know it now.

2)
Ironically, Dinosaur Quarry is just a small part of Dinosaur National Monument. The Quarry is near the Visitors Center at the park's entrance and why most people drive into the park, but it takes up a very small part of the 210,000 acres that comprise the monument, most of which contains no dinosaur bones. The remaining acreage, added by FDR in 1938, consists of two extraordinary river canyons, 58.5 river miles of the Green River and 47 miles of the Yampa River, as well as their surrounding mesas. This expanse is largely roadless, accessed mostly by boat, with very few points of entry. So other than those viewing Dinosaur Quarry, most of the park visitors are the 15,000 or so who run the river each year.

Now that might seem to leave me, coming neither for dinosaurs nor river running, in the (not terribly unfamiliar) position of odd-man out. But no, the monument also protects what it calls the canyon viewsheds, a word I'd never heard before, but precisely what I was there for: the fantastic landscapes that I trusted would encompass these river canyons.

My hopes were bolstered as I approached the park, driving through private ranch land, when my eyes were commanded by Split Mountain, a thick, looming nearly-white sandstone ridge deeply eroded by high dangling canyons. I became so engaged with thoughts of scrambling up this fine looking rock that I almost didn't register that the ranches had given way to another wonder, the slow lulling sweep of the Green River, ushering me into the park through sagebrush fields just off to my right. This stretch of calm river is an anomaly within Dinosaur. The Green had just finished slashing through over fifty miles of monument canyons - Lodore, Whirlpool, and Split Mountain the most significant. 

Split Mountain looming above Green River

.

After entering the monument and driving through a gauntlet of jagged hogbacks, I followed signs for the campground down a steep road to my left, directly toward Split Mountain. My eyes were now peeled for the campground (always an anxious time: is it nice, is it filled, will I get a good site, will I have quiet neighbors?) but all I could see was what looked like a large working ranch. Was Dinosaur outdoing Capitol Reef with the rural economy theme? No, the ranch – a private inholding that long predated the national monument – was on the other side of ... the Green River, which I had just turned directly away from. It seems the river, after tumbling out of Split Mountain Canyon, had flowed passed the campground and made a 180-degree loop to begin its languid stretch past the monument's entrance. This was just the first of much puzzling geography presented by Dinosaur, which crosses two states (Utah and Colorado), features two major rivers, contains large private property inholdings as well as great swaths of Bureau of Land Management land. It would take me a while to get my head around it.

Overview of campground, Green River, and Chew Ranch

Green River making its U-turn

The campground itself was fine, mostly grass and stressed cottonwoods flanking a rather ratty riparian reach, an abandoned floodplain in a dry, cold region (ten inches of precipitation a year with winter temperatures sometimes below zero). Ratty aesthetically not literally but squirrely it was: brazen ground squirrels who come after your food and will not be dissuaded. The campground host told me one had grabbed a piece of hot dog from a young child and I believe it, as once before one had climbed up my back in an effort to snatch my sandwich from over my shoulder. Here I took to eating my granola far from my picnic table when it appeared one particularly determined squirrel was preparing to leap into my bowl.

Squadrons of Canadian Geese loudly patrolled the river corridor, while in the ranch across the river a bevy of cows provided quality bellowing. A few polite horses grazed picturesquely, particularly near sunset. Ranch dogs barked through the night. Since they were quiet during the day I supposed they were doing night patrol, but I heard no coyotes so I wondered what exactly they were barking over. The host assured me there were all sorts of critters out there. The river itself was flat and quiet. I could hear but a slight murmur and then only at the quietest time of night. The air, though, was alive with bird song, some of it very remarkable and I wished I could reproduce it. Several birders wandered about and one informed me that the one I found most visually striking, particularly in flight, was known as the Bullock Oriole.

Looming above the campground, so close and so tempting, were the wonderful canyoned domes of Split Mountain. But alas they proved out of reach. Not only was the mountain on the other side of the river (not that I would swim across), it was separated from the river by the private ranch. The ranger advised me that hiking to that portion of the mountain was possible but would entail a long, off-trail trek. I would have to settle for the view, at least on this visit.

Split Mountain is actually split, cut in two by the Green River. The first scientific explorer of the Green, the geologist John Wesley Powell, concluded what seemed obvious: the river was there before the mountains and was able to cut downward as fast as the mountains could rise up around it.(2) This is called an antecedent river and is a common enough phenomenon. It is the way the Columbia River cut the Columbia Gorge through the Cascade Range.

But it wasn't what happened here. Subsequent geologists found evidence that the mountain was much older than the river, suggesting that the river had cut straight into an existing mountain rather than flow around it. Since that is basically impossible another explanation was called for and it proved to be this: the mountain was there before the river but the mountain was under ground. The Uinta Mountains, of which Split Mountain is a mere foothill, were once far greater mountains than they are now (and they are still pretty great mountains). Over the millennia they eroded down toward their current status, shedding enough debris to bury the likes of Split Mountain. Green River eventually came along, wore through the easily-eroded erosive rubble, and cut its river bed down until it essentially dug up Split Mountain. By this time the river was too deeply entrenched to do anything but keep cutting down, creating Split Mountain Canyon more or less through the middle of Split Mountain. (For those seeking class credit, the term for this type of river is called superimposed.)

Split Mountain/Green River

Split Mountain and Split Mountain Canyon

A ten-mile road extends past the campground, over the river and through the ranch to some of the monument's more accessible features, the activities the rangers recommend to those looking to spend an hour or two at the park after visiting the Dinosaur Quarry. I had at least two weeks but the weather was not yet conducive to the longer excursions I planned so I quite happily did what there was to do near at hand.

A modest climb up a rocky cliff yielded some fine petroglyphs etched into the rock, which archaeologists identify as the work (play?) of the Fremont culture, semi-nomadic people who lived on the Colorado Plateau from A.D. 200 to 1300. The petroglyphs themselves cannot be dated, but may be up to one thousand years old. I had spent most of the spring on the Colorado Plateau and had seen a fair number of Fremont pictographs (one could spend a whole lifetime and see millions more), but a few of these were unique. A large, well-worked lizard instantly became my favorite petroglyph to date. A seemingly Monty Python-influenced illustration was the most outlandish I'd ever seen. And a striking female head was clearly the inspiration for the signature self-portrait of the mother of the (then) seven-year old dinosaur critic.

A couple of short trails wound through the geologic rubble lying beneath Split Mountain and provided some fine views.

I just barely avoided jumping on to this rock before I noticed the snake. Don't know if it is poisonous.

Another short trail wandered through the 19^th-century homestead of a pioneer woman named Josie Basset Morris, who built her own cabin in 1913 and lived there for over 50 years. A bit of a renegade for her day, she was married five times, divorced four, her last husband dying somewhat mysteriously. As a youth she had a (documented) acquaintance with Robert Parker, the outlaw known as the Sundance Kid. She later claimed to have renewed that acquaintance some ten years after he was reported gunned down in Bolivia. That portion of her story remains distinctly undocumented.

Her homestead was very successful thanks in part to its location at a canyon at the base of Split Mountain, which is comprised almost entirely of a rock formation called Weber Sandstone. Sandstones are famously porous, absorbing precipitation and generating seeps and springs at their base. This canyon is particularly productive and she used the abundant seepage to cultivate a rich fruit orchard that even today is the most plush canyon mouth I've seen.

Josie's Cabin

To Josie's Orchard

3)

All of this was fun but I was just biding my time, waiting for some decent weather before heading out to what for me was most alluring attraction of Dinosaur National Monument: Harper's Corner, overlooking the confluence of the Green and the Yampa Rivers. I have a thing for stream confluences and this is a big one. The Green, rising in the Wind River Range of Wyoming, is the largest tributary to the Colorado River, nearly equal in flow to the Colorado at their confluence. The Yampa is the largest unregulated tributary remaining in the Colorado River system. It rises on the western slopes of the Colorado Rockies and runs some 200 miles before digging into Dinosaur National Monument.

On top of this confluential significance, Harper's Corner promised what Ralph Lee Hopkins, my primary guide to exciting geology on the Colorado Plateau (3), calls a spectacular birds-eye view of an extraordinary geological phenomenon. Supporting this opinion, the Dinosaur park brochure features a small photo of the view, in brilliant light, a black bear implausibly superimposed, that had been taunting me since I'd arrived.

So on the morning with the first promising forecast - mostly sunny with a chance of late afternoon thunderstorms, perfect, I was off as early as I could manage (8:30) for the 60 mile drive. The Harper's Corner Road is the one paved road that does penetrate deep into the monument, traversing private ranches and BLM land along the way, criss-crossing state lines and ending up in Colorado. I got there way too late for good morning light, but I was too excited to care, too excited to even change to hiking shoes, and I set off along the one mile trail for what good light remained. I knew this was just an introductory walk. I planned on staying around Harper's Corner all day, hopefully until sunset.

The short trail runs through a by-now very familiar forest of juniper and pinyon pine. A few window views opened out to tempting landscapes but I didn't linger, heading straight for the climactic overlook. Only near its end does the trail emerge from the brush, jutting out onto bare exposed rock, cliffs dropping almost straight down 2500 feet to the river. Those who wish can stay behind a safety guard rail.

The scene was truly epic and hard for me to describe, but here goes. The overview is perched at 7,580 feet, 2,500 feet above the canyons below  From this point the two rivers are visible only as glimpses as they flow toward their confluence; they are largely implied by the canyons they've cut into the mountains. The Yampa meanders in more or less from the east, through a maze of deep Weber Sandstone canyons, meandering that is through a thousand feet of hard rock, which is preposterous. If a river is going to cut a canyon it cuts it straight down, it does not meander. As with the Green River in Split Mountain Canyon, the Yampa is superimposed. It did once meander through erosive debris before entrenching itself into the sandstone and then digging down, a thousand feet and counting.

The Green comes in from the northeast with a sweeping pattern beneath towering reddish cliffs, a suite of slope-forming rock formations that looked familiar but had different names than any I'd seen elsewhere on the Colorado Plateau. It was just completing its seventeen-mile run through the Canyon of Lodore, entering a brief lull before entering the next canyon.

The landscape was so enormous and so startling that it took me a while to realize what was most startling about it. Each of the two canyons are comprised of radically different rock formations and these formations are aligned side-by-side, as if each river had brought along its own landscape. It is one enormous landscape juxtaposed against another enormous landscape, conjoined at a fault known as the Mitten Park Fault. It was this point of contact that most drew my eye: emerging directly out of the river and rising several hundred feet is a wall of bare, intricate rock formations, lifted up and twisted into a near-vertical snarl. Geologists might call this a sharply dipping formation and say it is not so unusual in nature, but here the exposure, the view, the location, combine to make it one of the best dramatically picturesque geologic sites I've ever seen. Thank goodness for cameras.

Mitten Park Fault Uplift

  

Yampa River cutting through Weber Sandstone

The muddy Yampa

The maze of Yampa Canyon

The actual river confluence is out of view, hidden behind a light beige (Weber) sandstone monolith called Steamboat Rock, rising 1,010 feet above the river though still some 1,400 feet beneath me. The combined stream emerges curling around the southern end of Steamboat Rock through a small exquisite meadow, some trees for shade, a place of refuge the Powell Expedition named Echo Park for the fun the crew had bouncing echoes off the high cliff walls. This is not visible from the lookout as Steamboat Rock is a mile long, but can be seen along the Harper's Point trail. The waters of the two rivers have not yet assimilated and the river has two distinctly colored strips – the brown silt of the the wild Yampa, and the much clearer Green, which drops most of its silt upstream behind Flaming Gorge Dam.

Striped River at Echo Park

The river then turns back (north) and for the first time becomes visible from the overlook as it flows directly far below across the face of Steamboat Rock and Mitten Park Fault. By this point it is consistently muddy like the Yampa but nevertheless called the Green. It then wraps around the rock pedestal of the overlook, going out of sight once more unless you climbed out to the extreme edge of the precipice and got down on your belly to peer over. I gave this some consideration before resigning myself to noticing the start of Wild Mountain rising beyond the canyon walls further north. The river finally reemerges on the west side of the overlook for a long abnormally straight westerly run through more towering red cliffs, a reach Powell named Whirlpool Canyon. This stretch is actually the first part of the scene you see emerging from the wooded trail and alone would be quite enough reason to make the trip. I present it last for logic's sake, since it is downstream hence last. But it is just the start. As well as the end.

Don't slip now

Far edge of Overlook looking north

Whirlpool Canyon

That I was looking out over a thrillingly wild landscape and not over yet another western reservoir - party boats, transmission lines, the works - is the result of a major conservation effort in the 1950s that stopped construction of a 529-foot tall dam right beneath the perch now hosting Harper's Corner Overlook. The dam was to be named after Powell's Echo Park, which of course the reservoir would have drowned, as it would have drowned the gnarled Mitten Park Fault and both the Green and Yampa Rivers for the entire length of the national monument and beyond. A smaller subsidiary dam was to be built at Split Rock near the Visitors Center, backing the river all the way to the foot of the larger dam at Echo Park, drowning Split Rock and Whirlpool Canyons. There would have been virtually no running rivers the entire length of Dinosaur National Monument.

Dam building was sacrosanct back then. But an opposition arose that saw the proposal through the bitter lights of the construction over a generation earlier of Hetch-Hetchy dam in Yosemite National Park, considered then to be the greatest conservation defeat to date. The opponents pushed the proposition that National Park land is also sacrosanct, and no more dams should be raised there. The argument was successful and the government eventually withdrew the Echo Park Dam proposal, a win for the national parks but far from an unmitigated conservation victory. For the government went on to build without opposition both the dam at Flaming Gorge upstream on the Green and the Glen Canyon dam downstream on the Colorado, drowning the then relatively unknown Glen Canyon, a conservation loss that in hindsight came to rival that of Hetch-Hetchy, perhaps more painful since no battle was even fought. So the boats and the powerlines can be found at many other places, with views over countless reservoirs, some of them quite nice. Here is a great and quiet expanse.

After a while I retreated to the picnic table at the parking lot for lunch and then to the shade of a pinyon pine to while away the middle of the day. It was lovely and quite quiet, as not one car so much as entered the parking lot in the two hours I was on duty. I then drove to the Echo Park Overlook, bringing my camp chair out to that viewpoint to sit in the shade alternately reading and gazing for another hour or so. One couple came by the entire time.

In mid-afternoon I walked the Harper's Corner trail again. The light was much better and I got one of my favorite pictures of the Mitten Park Fault, the one featured above. (I saw two people this time out, a young couple with Oregon plates.) I had the park's trail guide in hand, and paid more attention to the parts of the landscape I had ignored my first time through. It is a complicated geography. (Warning: more descriptive writing ahead.)

The canyons of the Green and the Yampa give way to the south to yet another entirely distinct landscape, an expansive piece of more or less flat meadowlands lying halfway between me and the river bottoms. It seems to be known generally as Yampa Bench. Yampa Bench is in turn bordered to the south by a rounded ridge some thousand feet higher than the overlook by the name of Round Top Mountain. It doesn't exactly loom but does present a vertical visual boundary, and held significant patches of snow in late May. Its wooded slopes angle down to another plateau of green meadow, still a level above the Yampa Plateau, that is shockingly flat even as it is tilted up at an angle. I have to assume this is what the park map refers to as the Billiard Table. This rise gives way to rumpled sandstone cliffs that drop to a bowl-shaped bottom of green meadow eroded with furrows into red clay, creating a fine red-green. This may be Pearl Park. A small creek that is definitely called Pool Creek cuts along the edge of the furrowed meadow before cutting its own canyon down into Echo Park.

The Billiard Table

Rumpled Cliffs

Round Top Mountain giving way to Pearl Park (?)

Round Top Mountain, Billiard Table, Rumpled cliffs, Pearl Park, Pool Creek, I don't know

As I say it is a complicated landscape and I wouldn't put too much faith in the complete accuracy of my portrayal. It is a start. I might have explored it more closely, and I was dying to, along a narrow dirt road running from the Harper's Point Road to a campground tucked out of site at Echo Park but I couldn't. The road requires a high-clearance vehicle and I drive a Toyota Yaris. A couple of other high-clearance roads lead into the park's backcountry that were beyond my reach. Nowhere else in the national park system were the limitations of my vehicle as frustrating as at Dinosaur. I felt like I was outside peaking through the windows. But I was far from forlorn. I appreciated what I had.

Much later I contemplated why I preferred this landscape to Grand Canyon (not that I'm anywhere near done with Grand Canyon) and why it was possibly the best landscape I'd ever seen. It is not nearly as enormous as Grand Canyon, obviously, but consequently it is more comprehensible (which is not to say I can comprehend it.) I think it is the variety. At Grand Canyon nearly everything is an erosive feature, making it in that sense a single spectacular note. Harper's Point offers more diversity - wide grasslands and small meadows, a touch of mountains and forest - amid the erosion.

One other factor, and no small point: no lodges, no gift shops, no parking issues, no crowds compromised this scene. I was standing there in late morning on a beautiful spring day an easy mile walk from my car, itself parked at the end of a lovely paved scenic road and I was the only one there! A park ranger and three friends or perhaps trainees were coming down from the view point when I arrived, but once they left I had the place to myself. I would walk the trail three times that day and would see a total of nine other people along the way. I was never not alone at the climactic overlook.

And maybe that is all there really is to this facile comparison. If I had to struggle to park and jostle to share the space with thousands of others, I might very well not be trumpeting Harper's Corner at all. (Can you imagine having Grand Canyon to yourself?) Luckily I am a barely read blogger if that, so no amount of hosannas from me will bring the crowds to Harper's Corner.

After dinner I set off up the Harper's Corner trail for the third time. The skies had grown stormy and a localized thunderstorm was already pummelling an adjacent ridge. The western sky remained sunny and clear so I was pretty sure I would be getting some kind of visual drama. A young couple and their small child were coming back out the trail, making a total of nine people I'd see all day. The mother said she hoped I didn't get too wet. I said I was ready for wet, I hoped I didn't get struck by lightning.

Incoming!

Echo Park again

Just as I got to the viewpoint it started to rain, even as the sun remained bright in the west, and sure enough up popped a rainbow, more or less exactly along the Mitten Park Fault. Even the Losers...

I was getting wet but I had brought my rain jacket. My concern was for my camera and that maybe the rain was spoiling my shots. I took some pictures from beneath a juniper but that provided limited protection. I had started carrying an umbrella to waterfalls in western Washington and Oregon for just such situations and one still laid buried somewhere in my car, but it had been a long time since I'd given much thought to an umbrella on this trip. (Upon reflection I recalled it was in December at Furnace Creek in Death Valley, where a lovely light rain had begun to contribute to that locale's annual inch or two of precipitation. Quite wittily, I thought, I went into the gift shop and inquired if they sold umbrellas. I was hoping for an appreciative laugh – I get them now and then – but the gift shop clerks did not recognize my facetiousness and suggested I try the Furnace Creek Ranch Store. Apparently it's hard to spoof the requests of the national park visitor.)

Whirlpool Canyon, with raindrops

Overlook and Pinyon Pine

Soon enough the rain subsided – on the Harper's Point Overlook at any rate; I could see it still falling in other spots across the enormous vista – so I could take pictures with less anxiety. The problem now was the rainbow. I was done with this ephemeral rainbow and wanted to focus on the timeless rocks, but instead of fading away the rainbow kept getting brighter. Then there was a second and even a third over in Echo Park, though technically I guess one was the other end of the first one.

The storm's light and dark were exciting but I never did get as good a composition as I might have because I was too distracted by the rainbow. It occurred to me and not for the first time that a professional photographer put in my place – one never seems to be there - would have cleaned up, not distracted by the commonplaces of rain or rainbow though possibly by thoughts of what he or she would do with all the money the pictures would bring in.

Anyway, here's some more of what I got.

Spotlight on Mitten Park Fault

Spotlight on Steamboat Rock (y'all)

Spotlight on Canyon of Lodore

I had gone a bit beyond the safety barrier

Sort of a Rembrandt one

Whirlpool Canyon adieu

Eventually darker skies and ever encroaching thunder led me to declare victory and head back to the car. On the drive I stopped one last time at the Echo Park Overlook, curious as to whether the same rainbow could be seen from there and the answer was yes, there they were, shooting out of the ground like rockets. They really do have an objective reality. Funny how it took me 62 years to learn that. The downpour held off until I got back into the car, and I drove down across the Yampa Plateau in dark spooky torrents.

4)

Dinosaur National Monument is not a major hiking park. The longest official trail and the only one in my hiking book is the Jones Hole Creek Trail, so that was my next destination. This was another long drive, 45 miles, almost all of it outside the park across private ranches, to the 5200' trailhead. Here Jones Hole Creek emerges newly born and nearly complete from natural springs that issue up to 15,000 gallons per minute. The instant creek then flows four miles down to Green River. It's a real aberration in these parts, and a godsend. Native trout breed in the creek and the Powell expedition had its first fresh trout dinner at its mouth on the Green. Today the Jones Hole National Fish Hatchery uses the spring water to raise over a million trout a year to restock lakes and rivers of the upper Colorado River system, waters where natural fish production was destroyed by dam building and other degradations.

The four mile trail drops gradually alongside the creek and I felt like I was floating. A boisterous creek, lush riparian vegetation, these were things I hadn't seen since October in the Sierras. Compared to the places I'd been the past few months this was the Olympic Peninsula, the Elwha maybe, except for the enormous stratified towers rising up on both sides. A group of four fishermen shadowed me for a while but soon they found their places along the stream. I went on, moving so smoothly and happily that I hiked straight past one of the trail's features, a wall of pictographs and petroglyphs, even though I spotted the sign indicating them. I figured this must be some lesser display, as the real ones were two miles in and I just couldn't consider that I'd already gone that far.

Jones Hole Creek

Jones Hole Creek

In another mile or so the valley opened up and the canyon walls rose even higher above a lightly wooded meadow. I spotted a Bighorn sheep, an ewe, across the creek. It didn't seem too concerned with me. Down near the Green the trail broke off into several directions and signs expressly directed day hikers to follow one specific path. The other trails led to boater camps and I guess they didn't want us low-rent hikers bothering these more lucrative guests. I came upon two boaters coming from the day hiker beach (I guess the segregation only runs one way), and they were expressing concern with the state of the trees. Box elders they said, and they seemed to know, with too many dead branches, the damage, they hypothesized, incurred by beavers. They asked me about downed branches on the hike down but having never been there before I really couldn't say. Nothing compared to hiking Deception Creek in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness before the trail crew comes through, I knew that much, but that was no help. They suggested I come look at the situation in their river camp. I said I might a bit later and continued to the hiker's beach.

Here the Green River was stuck deep in a huge but wide canyon, the very Whirlpool Canyon I'd looked down upon from Harper's Point. I wasn't a whole lot more than a swan dive from a spot that was some three hours away by car. I found some shade on the sandy beach and it did indeed feel like a beach. A cool breeze on a warm day, the river, quite muddy thanks to the Yampa, rippling in what looked to me to be not whirlpools but small steady waves. I wished I had brought a book as I didn't want to hike back so soon in the heat of the day, so in order to spend some time I wrote out some baseball analyses that had been rattling around in my head lately every time I ate breakfast.

Green River - Whirlpool Canyon

Green River - Whirlpool Canyon

Then I went to explore the boater camps, since I did have an invitation. I found three nice shady camps, all deserted. They were numbered 2 through 4 so I surmised camp 1 was set on the other side of Jones Hole Creek, which I didn't feel like trying to ford. I found what I really wanted to see, the creek mouth, at Camp 2. Beavers had built a dam so the creek was backing up, and humans had breached the dam just enough to keep the creek from turning into wetlands. But the most exciting part was, yes, the confluence. The crystal clear spring-fed creek hit the muddy Green and stopped, visually, like a wall. It was the most distinct demarcation I'd ever seen. The most distinct imaginable.

Boaters Camp Jones Creek Hole

Confluence of Jones Hole Creek and Green River

Jones Hole Creek - Green River - Whirlpool Canyon

Beaver Dam - Mouth of Jones Hole Creek

The hike back was a bit slower and hotter, but still very fine. I figured if I was ever in this area again I would descend later in the day so as to come back in the cooler late afternoon. One of the boaters I'd met earlier was hiking back toward the river. They were in fact at camp 1 and had the day off before a big day that would take them to take out at Split Mountain Campground. She said she'd come upon three bighorns in the meadow a bit up the trail, including a big male that wouldn't bother moving out of the way until one of the females started following her (the hiker), at which point the male got up and intervened. I would have loved to come upon that crowd but they had dispersed by the time I got to the meadow. No more bighorn for me. I had to settle for the pictographs I'd missed on the way down, and they were quite good, featuring not just a bighorn but a two-legged with an exploding head. I was back to my car for an early dinner. A sign at the trailhead had estimated round trip travel time for the hike as 3 to 8 hours, my kind of range. I had taken six and would have been happy to make it eight if only I had brought a book.

5)

For my third and final Dinosaur expedition I drove 140 miles to the Gates of Lodore, a far-flung outpost of the national monument, used primarily as a put-in for boaters to run the Green River. This at least was a one way trip, as I would be leaving Dinosaur from there. The Gates of Lodore are the entryway to Lodore Canyon, which runs for seventeen miles under walls up to 3000 feet high. Like so much of Dinosaur, it was named by the Powell Expedition, after a poem called The Cataract of Lodore by Robert Southey, a favorite of Powell's. Jack Sumner, one of the more grizzled crew members, opined in his journal that naming the spectacular canyon after such “musty trash” was “un-American, to say the least”. I don't know if he was a shrewd critic or a no-nothing, but he just might have been cranky. The expedition had suffered disaster on its first day in the canyon, wrecking one of their four boats on the first major falls they encountered, losing a good portion of supplies in the process. Sumner proved heroic that day, rescuing the shipwrecked and recovering valuable supplies. He could very well have been disgusted that he had joined an expedition that seemed more facile with British literature than with running rivers.

The campground was empty except for one site which had one tent, two trucks, and no people. The toilet door featured a suite of warnings: this was bear country, sure; there was an active mountain lion in the area, well…; plus a rabbit in the campground had tested positive for Tularemia, a new one on me but a familiar story – rodents carry it, insects spread it, potentially fatal to humans but treatable with antibiotics. The sign advised against handling rodents, their droppings, or their saliva – I figured I could manage that - and also to avoid insect bites - impossible. Camping full time I'd have to poison myself with Deet. In fact I don't use any. I wear long pants and a long sleeve shirt even while hiking and that will have to do. For ticks I tuck my socks up into my pants and try to avoid tall grass. I have no one to check for ticks on my trickier parts and I don't really bother checking the easier parts. I've never had a tick as far as I know, though as far as I know I could have three on the back of my skull right now. I could maybe deploy a mirror.

This portion of the park has only one official trail, a short climb to an overlook of the Gates of Lodore. I walked it twice on Sunday night, enjoying fine riverscape though the overview provides only a mid-distance view of the canyon. To fully appreciate this place you really do need a boat. From somewhere around where I stood, Powell viewed the canyon at noon and called it “a beautiful portal, to a region of glory”. The night before entering it though, he called it “a dark portal to a region of gloom”. Echo Park Dam would have flooded the Canyon of Lodore; Flaming Gorge Dam tamed it from upstream. The canyon was no longer the wild imposing one the Powell team encountered, though with contemporary nicknames such as “Hell's Half Mile” it must still be a beaut.

A park nature guide told me mostly what I already knew about the common high desert plants. It also pointed out some very old rocks along the river. It didn't mention the cadaver lying just off the trail, an ungulate - bighorn sheep, deer, I couldn't tell. It was all fur and bone, no meat left to attract a cougar, so I felt comfortable enough walking by it though I found myself looking over my shoulder a couple of times at the overlook.

The campground was as quiet and dark as any I've ever experienced. I would have stayed a few nights just for that but there wasn't a heck of a lot to do there. It's mostly a place for river runners and there were no river runners there that day. The campground host told me most boaters were running the wild Yampa, still running high with spring snow melt. They'd switch to the Green when Flaming Gorge Dam releasd more water into the Green as the Yampa's seasonal flows diminished. This is no trivial matter to river runners, and the dam's release schedule was posted on the ranger station door.

The occupied site remained people-less through the evening and I was wondering what they had found to do. As dark settled in they still hadn't arrived and I concluded they were running the river, with a third vehicle to bring them back to their tent (which in retrospect makes little sense but I wasn't thinking all that hard about it).

I was sitting in my camp chair in near total darkness looking at the stars when a bright light appeared on top of the ridge enclosing the campground. At first I thought it was plane but soon I realized it was ground level, hikers descending one very steep slope in the dark, though wielding a killer lamp. Aha, the missing campers, either very skilled or very foolhardy, I didn't know which. My curiosity got the best of me, so when they finally got to their camp and got a fire going I wandered over to more or less find out which it was. Skilled. They'd been out two nights, were well equipped, and had descended the slope on an old wagon trail they knew, one I'd walked by without even noticing.

Another car showed up a bit later (dark, empty campgrounds can be so dramatic). These late arrivals made no noise and the next morning I could see they had slept in their car. Eventually two guys got out, donned packs and headed out, way too prepared for the little overlook trail. One of the backpackers I had met the night before told me the two new guys were heading into the bush in search of a treasure left somewhere in the woods by someone who believed he was dying of cancer and had published a poem that provided clues to the treasure's whereabouts. This was apparently a well-publicized phenomenon; my interlocutor told me the state of New Mexico had estimated 40,000 hikers had come to the state to search for this treasure. I had just spent a month in New Mexico and heard nothing about it, score one for keeping to myself. Back in civilization I looked it up and found out the man's name is Forrest Fenn, the treasure worth over a million dollars and its location “north of Santa Fe”. In June 2020 someone found the treasure in Wyoming. Fenn died three months later, at the age of 90.

The morning was lovely. No marauding ground squirrels, just poison rabbits and a good supply of birds, including a beautiful small yellow one I don't believe I'd ever seen before. (Yellow warbler?) The river put me in a reflective mood. I walked the Gates of Lodore Trail three more times waiting for the red cliffs to achieve their morning glory. On my third pass the voluble camper asked me if I'd noticed the carcass. He told me the ranger said it had been an elk and that four or five more, including a huge bull, lay dead at the bottom of the cliff. Active mountain lion indeed.

Green River

Green River

Green River (yes, I do like reflections)

The Gates of Lodore

The Gates of Lodore

2 - I get most of my information on John Wesley Powell from Wallace Stegner's very great Beyond the Hundredth Meridian. The book also contains an account of the feud between Cope and Marsh.

3 - Ralph Lee Hopkins - Hiking the Southwest's Geology