Southern WY Along 191 and Dinosaur National Monument

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I’m currently catching up my connected life in Moab, Utah where I’m having a delicious sandwich at Pantele’s Desert Deli (thanks for the recommendation, Bret!), downloading photos, and going through emails. Thus far, the trip has been great! My only regret is not getting a quick interview from a guy named Steven that I met in Dinosaur National Monument when he told me about someone going door-to-door in Grand Juction, Colorado offering to pay residents to put up shielded lighting and having the vast majority of them refuse, even though it came out of his pocket and would cost them nothing. Lesson learned. Thanks for the great conversation regardless, Steven and Bill!

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After a late start on Tuesday, I found myself driving south along Highway 191 in southern Utah, a spectacular high desert region blanketed with juniper trees with the occasional bare spot exposing millions of years of erosion along ancient seabeds in the form of badlands. I had always wanted to camp here, and thanks to what seemed like setbacks, were the perfect excuse to get me to only see the tip of the iceberg of the region. I could spend weeks exploring the entire area and still not tire of it. The sunrise the next morning only whet my appetite for more, but it was also time to move on.

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I didn’t go that much farther, relatively. I only went down the highway to Dinosaur National Monument, found straddling the border of northern Utah and northwestern Colorado. Having never been to the Colorado side, I decided to continue that trend and see the Utah side again. After all, it had been several years.

Rather than sticking to the main roadside attractions, I found myself exploring game trails, guiding me to unusual and different views of the park that simply fascinating me as the vistas of the uplift demonstrated throughout the park became more and more evident. The entire region appears as a massive rock shoved out of the ground, eroded over eons, creating immense wavy canyons deep into the stone. Because the area was an ancient seabed, the ground is littered with dinosaur fossils from 149 million years ago, as demonstrated in the Quarry Exhibit.

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What will Moab and beyond bring? Time to go find out!

To see more images from Dinosaur National Monument, check out my Dinosaur National Monument Gallery here.
To see more images from southern Wyoming, check out my Misc Wyoming gallery here.

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