Dinosaur National Monument, Part One: Echo Park
Damn. The steak was half-cooked before I realized I didn’t have any salt and pepper. I was not at the sort of campground where there’s a general store just up the road. In fact, it was twelve miles to the nearest paved road, twenty-five more until you hit something that actually had a highway number and some forty miles beyond that before you’d find anything resembling a store.
While I weighed my options — none really — the corn fell off the grill and landed right on the coals. Damn.
You make do I suppose. I pulled the corn out of the fire, gave it a quick rinse and called it done. I ate the steak straight off the grill, pioneer style — no seasoning at all. Well, maybe not true pioneer-style. Maybe the style of pioneers with piss-poor planning skills. The sort of pioneers that probably busted on the whole “Oregon or bust” thing.
Whatever the case, the steak wasn’t half bad, even without salt. I was just happy enough to have found some peace and quiet. I didn’t much care what I was eating.
After days of wading through the crowds in Yellowstone I was finally in a place where the loudest sounds were the birds and the rush of the wind through the canyon, somewhere without SUVs and obnoxious children screaming from the doorway of their parents’ motorhome about the lack of stuffed bears.
I ended up here in Dinosaur National Monument on a whim. I was planning to drive straight through to Grand Junction, but then I thought, what the heck, it’s right there. I detoured off the road up to the rather ramshackle Ranger Station. It turned out the double-wide ranger station is a temporary thing. I went inside and listened to the ranger patiently explain to a very disappointed French couple, that the fossil quarry — the namesake and main draw of Dinosaur National Monument — was in fact closed to the public.
That’s when I decided to stay. I’ve never really been interested in fossils. They’re pretty much just rocks at this point. There’s plenty of data to be gleaned from them, I get that, but I leave it to paleontologists and geologists to put that in story form for me. Close encounters with the raw materials leave me feeling like I’m missing something — sort of like looking at a Warhol.
The truth is, if you really want to see dinosaur bones, you’re better off heading to the Smithsonian. All the best fossils have long since been carted off to museums.
So, in short, this is the perfect time for someone like me to visit Dinosaur National Monument, because, as it turns out, this place was poorly named. The best parts of it are not the fossils but the canyon country — some of the best, most remote canyon country you’ll find in this part of the world.
Whether it was the the closed quarry or just the out-of-the-way nature of Dinosaur I don’t know, but Dinosaur National Monument is almost completely deserted. On the drive in to Echo Park I saw only one other car in nearly fifty miles. The campground was similarly deserted, five or six other cars had staked out spots.
Aside from the tributary canyon that provides vehicle access to Echo Park, the area — maybe five acres — is completely ringed in sheer sandstone cliffs. As dusk settles in somewhere on top of the mesas above us, Swallows and bats emerge from the cliffs to prey on the insects.
The wind dies down and mosquitos come out. They are annoying, the most annoying I’ve encountered on this trip. But world travel gives you different perspective on mosquitos. Here is the U.S. mosquitos are just annoying, they do not carry malaria or dengue fever or yellow fever or any other horrifying diseases (at least for now). The worst thing that happens is you itch a little.
A small price to pay for peace and quiet and beauty.
Echo Park1 is really a sand bar that got out of hand. Just a stone’s throw from here the Green and Yampa rivers meet. The confluence happens at the start of a very sharp horseshoe bend which means the excess sand and silt of both rivers ends up here, on the far side of the horseshoe.
At some point in the geologic past the sand deposit got to be too much for the river to carry away, even in floods. Then the grasses took hold, anchoring the sand and sediment. Over time the ground solidified and trees sprung up. That part of nature that needs solidity formed a semi-permanent beachhead — Echo Park. And yes, it does echo, more on that in part two.
Of course there’s no guarantee Echo Park will be here forever. Look at what the river did to the sandstone that surrounds Echo Park — it’s cut through thousands of feet of sandstone. If the wants its overgrown sandbar back, the river will have it. Rivers always win in the end, but for this geologic moment it’s here and it’s quite spectacular.
It’s also incredibly quiet and peaceful. As I write this my fingers clicking on the keys are the loudest sound in Echo Park. The songbirds have settled down for the night, the fire crackles softly.
The people who lived here called Echo Park “The Center of the Universe.” It’s not hard to see why, the huge, silent ring of cliff walls seem knowing, having watched over this river since the world was made. The rock walls remain whether the swallows come or go, whether the mosquitoes bite or not, whether the river floods or doesn’t, whether I keep typing or stop. They simply exist as they have for millions of years — massive and silent, watching as we, mere blips on the geologic radar, come and go, looking up at them, admiring their near eternity in our momentary passing.
[Note: this story is part of my quest to visit every National Park in the U.S. You can check out the rest on the National Parks Project page.]
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Why is every flat piece of land in Colorado called a park? (Estes Park, Echo Park, Island Park, etc) Is that a tourism board thing? Or just a quirk of naming conventions? Cause we have the same sort of things back east, we just call them meadows or valleys or canyons or whatever. But now I think we might be missing out on something… ↩
Thoughts?
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