Brinda's Head West!: Camping in Dinosaur land

Our next stop was Dinosaur land in Utah where we camped for one night at the Green River campground. We were very close to Quarry Exhibit Hall where the Wall of Bones is located. We made the most of our first day by taking the shuttle to the Wall of Bones and then taking the hiking trail back to the Visitor's Center.

The path you see is the Fossil Discovery trail that goes from the Visitor's Center to the Quarry Exhibit Hall. We saw a couple fossils and some petroglyphs.

White arrow is supposed to be pointing out a fossil but we were not sure what it was.

One of these looks like a vertebra but I cannot tell what the first one is.

You may have heard of the invasion of Mormon Crickets in Nevada and other areas. We ran into them on our drive to get to Dinosaur land! I did not realize they were crickets when we were on the freeway but here is a picture of what the road looked like.

I thought it was leaves or something. Then we decided to check out a few short hikes to see petroglyphs and an old cabin in the area. The trails had thousands of these crickets!! I didn't get any pictures - we were mostly trying to avoid them. But here is a pic from online.

They can get up to three inches long and they were just gross!! Every step we took on the trail made about ten of them jump out of the way. Avery was afraid at first...she kept falling farther behind on the trail and Carlton said she started shaking because she was so afraid of them! He gave her a little pep talk about what a big girl she was and how they were more afraid of her. All she had to do was a big girl stomp to make them jump away. That seemed to help a lot!

So here are some petroglyphs we found.

We also saw Turtle Rock.

Then we made our way to Josie Bassett Morris' cabin where she lived for 50 years until she died at 90 in 1964. From her cabin we did a hike to a box canyon nearby where she used to corral her animals.

We didn't go all the way to the box canyon because it was pretty warm and the trail had very little shade. So we went back to the cabin where we had parked and then Carlton and Gavin decided to hike to the other box canyon where Josie kept animals. I think Avery had had enough of the crickets.

Back at the campground, the kids decided they needed to go to the river and stick their feet in. It was definitely muddy but at least we didn't have the crickets at our campground!! I think all the lizards were keeping them away.

This was our campground, right near the Green River! On our way out of town the next day, we stopped at the Visitor's Center again for the kids to be sworn in as Junior Rangers of Dinosaur National Monument.