June dinosaurs

One weekend we decided to check out Dinosaur National Monument. I loved crossing the Uinta Basin on highway 40. It was beautiful in that "I feel very small and the sky is so big" kind of way.

Mary at a rest stop:

I think this formation is called Shiprock, or something like that:
A funky stegosaurus at the visitor center:
The Quarry Visitor Center has been closed for some time because it's structurally unsafe. I remember stopping there when I was little. (Thanks to the stimulus package there is now money to rebuild it, which is good because it is very very cool, if my little memory serves me correctly.)
We went on a short hike that took us right by dinosaur fossils still in the rock.
Here is one:
And some vertebrae:
And this one looks like a femur:
It was really cool! At first it was hard to see them, but once you got the hang of it, there were so many!

David was more excited about finding dinosaur teeth (small sharp rocks):
It was a super short hike--not even a mile--but David (who is not a good hiker when not properly motivated by a group of older cousins or friends) couldn't quite make it to the finish on his own. And Mary couldn't quite make it to the finish without a snooze--looking for dinosaur fossils is hard work, after all.


We also visited the new Field Museum in Vernal. We liked it.
Here is David and an old school T-rex:
We had planned to hike out to some dinosaur tracks at a nearby state park, but the weather was ominous. Besides, the reservoir was so high the tracks would have been submerged. So instead we headed to Chuck-a-rama. (Classic.) Being in Vernal was half the fun of our day anyway!

Before we headed back home, we drove by the temple, converted from an old tabernacle building.
We had a fun day together.