More Camping

Mark and I went up to Dinosaur National Monument this weekend.  The weather was great, the scenery was beautiful, our campsite was perfect, and we had part of the park entirely to ourselves for most of our Sunday morning drive and hike.  This time, we also remembered to bring bratwursts for the campfire.  Yummy.  There were only a couple bad spots to the trip.  The first didn't become apparent until we settled into the tent for the night.  Turns our the air mattress (yes, I know it's a camping cop-out; so sue me) has a leak.  Thank you, kitty hind leg claws.  So we started the night with a very comfy sleeping surface, and woke to the ground.  Not pleasant.  Then we began our drive into the canyon part of the park and discovered a lovely insect called the Mormon cricket.  These guys are cannibalistic, which means all you have to do is run over one of the suckers on the road and you get a feeding frenzy, which in turn leads to more of the damn things getting squished, which brings on another onslaught of the nasty critters, and so on.  Our tires and wheel wells were absolutely coated with smelly, puke yellow bug guts.  Luckily, it rained on the way home.  And that leads to the last bit of unpleasantness of the trip:  spending two hours on a thirty-mile stretch of I-70 because everyone and their gaggle of long-lost cousins wanted to get back to Denver at 5PM yesterday.

But it was worth the trip.  Seeing a huge rock wall teeming with dinosaur bones of several different species was pretty amazing.  And then all the funky geological processes that formed the canyons and mountains in the park is wicked cool - in the "I'm a science geek" way that Mark and I share.  Plus it was remarkable to see the park on a Sunday morning when no one else was around.  I've never seen a place so deserted.  As sad as we thought it was that the rest of America was missing out on something so spectacular, we didn't mind being able to see it by ourselves.  Mark just got around to scanning in pictures of Sand Dunes from our last camping trip, and he will scan in some pictures of this trip (as soon as we get the film developed - hopefully tonight), and just maybe he'll get around to putting them on our long-neglected website so you can see two places you really need to visit if you're ever in the area.  Just stay in Salt Lake City so you don't have to mess with I-70 eastbound into Denver on your way back from the park.