Fossils

All Pacific Northwest Sites

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Alaska awaits, but in the meantime, I have visited all 4 National Parks and 16 park units in the Pacific Northwest region, plus 2 heritage areas, 1 affiliate, trails and biospheres. Part of the Manhattan Project NHP is in Washington too.

The four national parks all contain snow capped volcanoes. There are fossil, cave and geologic sites, 3 lake recreation areas, and many fascinating historic sites to enjoy. The region is beautiful, with rugged coastline, forests, mountains and wildlife.

Idaho

Oregon

Washington

Read my posts, and get out there and enjoy!

Dinosaur

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This is the Canadian World Heritage Site in Alberta, not the American Dinosaur National Monument.

Josh guided us into the restricted area, explained how to look for fossils and we sat down on a bone bed to look. I saw something with a pretty pattern, picked it up and showed it to Josh. He confirmed that it was part of a T-Rex—Gorgosaurus libratus—tooth, roughly 75 million years old. I just sat there for a while, stunned to be holding a real fossil like that in my hand after picking it up off the ground.

The park is the most productive dinosaur fossil ground on earth. And it’s also very beautiful, with camping and hiking along the river among the Cottonwood trees, some 200 years old. I saw a family of deer on the trail. Even the Badlands in Canada are nicer than the US.

It’s definitely worth signing up for a guided tour, although there’s also a drive with exhibits and places to look for fossils on your own. The above diorama is in the visitor center. Most of the assembled skeletons are at the Royal Terrell Museum a couple hours drive north, but the field work takes place here, especially in summer. Josh even stopped to mark and protect a new find from another group a week before. Impressive!

Dinosaur National Monument

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The Quarry Exhibit Hall, near Jensen Utah, has a crazy collection of large, late Jurassic dinosaur bones set in a two story high, very wide quarry wall, and you can touch them. It’s awesome. The Allosaurus skull above, a raptor talon-claw, Apatosaurus leg bones, and many Camarasaurus bones including a skull still set high in the quarry wall are all fascinating. This dinosaur exhibit is at the east end of the park after the Green River comes out of Split Mountain Canyon, and there’s a nice view, petroglyphs & pictograms.

Up the Green River is the extremely deep Canyon of Lodore, explored by John Wesley Powell, accessed from the north via permitted river trips or visible after a hike from the Gates of Lodore campground. Colorado’s Yampa River joins the Green from the east near Harper’s Corner, which has “the best view in the park” at the end of a hike and a 48 mile round trip drive. Unfortunately, I did not plan my charging to include either of those sections, so maybe next time.

There aren’t many good Tesla chargers around Dinosaur. Not sure why, but I noticed that some of the surrounding towns still support coal, have Halliburton operations, and have unfortunately unstable, irrational, fossil-fuel supporting representation in Congress. There’s a welcome center in Dinosaur Colorado with EV charging, but I don’t (yet) have the right kind of “combined charging system” CCS adapter. Since I’m in a hurry trying to visit high altitude parks during a short timeframe, I made due with a couple of 3rd party chargers I found using the PlugShare app, rather than stay in state park campgrounds. Especially when you get unexpected roadwork detours, being able to tap into other chargers is helpful.

Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument

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I just realized that my photo is almost the same as on the NPS app, but that’s because there’s not much else to see. The fossil, a common ancestor of the horse and zebra, is actually “a Frankenstein’s monster” of bones left over from a big Smithsonian dig. On the way in, there’s an overlook where you can see the bluff on the other side of the Snake River where a herd of these guys were found. That’s about it.

The river canyon is spectacular, and I even watched base jumpers while charging my car nearby. The visitor center is jointly run with the state, so don’t drive past it like I did.

Petrified Forest National Park

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The Triassic forests are gone, and all that remains are fossils like these. Our climate changes frequently, but extremely slowly. Sudden change is a crisis, because plants and animals lack the ability to adapt or evolve quickly. Hundreds of millions of years ago, this area was an equatorial jungle. The trees were buried by volcanic ash and sediment and soaked in mineral rich waters to fossilize, offering a rare glimpse back before the Jurassic dinosaurs.

The park film explains the distant past, the recent past and current attractions. I hope they improve their camping opportunities, so that visitors spend more time here. I enjoyed my brief time here. But it was difficult to find a car-camping campground in the area, so I moved on too quickly.

Our carbon emissions since the industrial revolution are like an asteroid strike against all life on earth. The Anthropocene, or human dominated age, has been very short, but it will be characterized by extensive global mass extinctions. And unlike a meteor, this time the devastation is entirely by choice. We know that we’re killing the plants & animals that we claim to love. But most of us apparently don’t care enough about the future to make any significant changes to save life on earth.

Click to see my photos of all national park units in Arizona.