Monuments, Dinosaurs, and Mesas…

Hey Guys!! We spent two weeks in the Grand Junction area of Colorado and we enjoyed it way more than we thought we would. Sometimes we’re not sure what the area we’re heading to is like. We try to make sure there’s an actual grocery store somewhere close, but you never really know until you’re pulling into the park. We’ve had some places look great on paper and then when we pull in…the entire area was a big nope for us. I’ll be honest, I kind of expected it to be that way for Grand Junction. So, when we got to Grand Junction and saw it, we were pleasantly surprised. It’s that perfect mix of small town vibe with all of the stores we like and with more than 1.5 million acres of public lands in the area…we had more than enough places to explore to keep us occupied.

A whopping seventy-five percent of Mesa County is made up of public lands. Guys, that’s insane! To give you a size comparison…Mesa County is larger than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. You’ll find areas for National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Forests, State Parks and even a few City Parks. I’m thinking we could easily spend an entire season exploring everything that the Grand Junction area has to offer.

The main reason we were staying in Grand Junction was to visit Colorado National Monument. We headed in to explore the plateau and canyon that make up the Colorado Monument on a few different afternoons. You can pretty much see all of the highlights if you do the 23 mile Rim Rock Drive, stopping at all of the well thought out scenic view points. Some will have short hikes to get to the view…most will not. We thought the Rim Drive was fantastic, but we like to get into the park and hike. We feel like you get a better feel for the landscape and the story the park is trying to tell/preserve.

Ten minutes down the road was the little Dinosaur Journey Museum. It was inexpensive to get in (even with five people) and it was stuffed with information on the dinosaurs that used to roam the Mesa County area. I’ve had songs from the animated show Land Before Time stuck in my head ever since. The animatronic dinosaurs seemed to all be characters from the show. Ha! We learned a lot in the museum even with me trying to get the boys to sing along to the songs of their early childhood.

The day after we visited the Dinosaur Journey Museum, we drove part of the Dinosaur Diamond Scenic Byway up to the Dinosaur National Monument. There are actually two parts to this National Monument. There’s the Colorado side, which has all of the grand vistas and geology information. This is the side we started on. We did a couple of hikes here, but since we were trying to get the entire park into just one day…we were kind of hoofing it. The views were absolutely amazing on this side of the National Park. We could have easily spent the entire day hiking and ogling the views here.

The Utah side of Dinosaur National Monument is all bout the dinosaurs and the petroglyphs. The first thing you’ll want to do is take the tram to the Quarry Exhibit Hall where you’ll come face to face with a huge wall of dinosaur bones. And Guys, these are the real deal…these aren’t the casts that you’ll so often see in museums. It’s hard to capture how big this bone wall is…it holds over 1,500 fossils that have been embedded within the rock. The scientist working the quarry that this rock wall is part of found over 500 different kinds of dinosaur remains along with some other animals who were alive during the Morrison time period. For the most part, you’re not allowed to touch the wall or the bones, but there are a few bones that the National Monument has set up so you can actually touch 149 million year old dinosaur bones. When we were done soaking up all of the dinosaur awesomeness…we headed back out to the park to find some petroglyphs and check out a cabin leftover from an early settler to the area. We saw quite a few lizards during our visit and if the petroglyphs are any indication…the lizards have been around for quite a while. There was a section of petroglyphs that had tons of giant lizards. I’m glad the lizards we saw were the little bitty variety and not the six foot beasts on the canyon walls.

The cabin used to belong to Josie Bassett Morris back in the early 1900s. She moved to Cub Creek when she was forty to establish a homestead. Most of the time she was there alone, but her family and friends from a nearby town visited as often as they could to check up on her. One day when she was out checking the cattle she fell off of her horse and ended up breaking her hip. Josie drug herself the entire way back to her cabin to heal. She lived at her homestead in Cub Creek for fifty years before passing away in the cabin. The cabin is still there. Open for anyone to walk through. You can see the remnants of the wall paper she had up…the nails are still there where she hung pictures of her family. The fire place has a couple of logs in it. If you close your eyes you can imagine the braided rugs on the floor and the handmade quilts on the bed. I enjoyed looking though the rooms and thinking about Josie’s life there. She was definitely a strong and independent woman.

We took an entire day to do the Grand Mesa National Scenic Byway where we explored the world’s largest flat-top mountain. So, what the heck is a Mesa? I know you’re wondering. A mesa is a wide mountain with steep sides and a flat top. Mesa is the Spanish word for table. Grand Mesa’s flattop is due to the cap of volcanic basalt it acquired around nine million years ago when lava pushed up through cracks in the earth covering a valley floor with basalt lava. Eventually, the soft rock around the hardened basalt lava eroded away and Grand Mesa was born. Around 14,000 years ago ice caps went through the area rearranging the tabletop and forming more than three hundred lakes and reservoirs.

Can we take a minute to appreciate all of the pretties I found in the Grand Junction area?! I mean…Guys…I think I took just as many pictures of flowers as I did all of the other awesomeness in the area!! And…I found one of my absolute favorites…fireweed!

We had two pretty good weeks in Grand Junction! We didn’t even scratch the surface of what there is to do. I think we’ll for sure have to go back and spend more time in Mesa County, Colorado.

This was our last stop in Colorado before heading on to Utah.

See Y’all down the road!!

#NationalParkTour