Photo Essay: Vernal Trip

Over the Labor Day weekend, we took our family trip for the summer, a three-day jaunt to Vernal, Utah. It had been Ian's birthday the previous Wednesday, so we continued the dinosaur-themed festivities by visiting Dinosaur National Park. Here is a little photo essay to document the trip.

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We began our trip on Friday by traveling down to Springville to visit our friends the Sorensons. Wendy and the kids were there, and we spent several hours visiting. Ian and MaeLin have been friends almost since birth. She is just a couple of months older, and they always seem to be able to pick up where they last left off. They always have fun playing together.

Nate feels obligated to get into anything and everything, everywhere we go. He had a good time playing with BrookLin, the Sorensons' baby girl. Here he is in a moment of happy repose. (Note the missing shoe.)

The highlight of our trip happened Saturday morning--even before we entered the park. Just outside the national monument is a shop selling T-shirts, toys, and all manner of dinosaur-related accoutrement. Outside the shop is a giant apatasaurus (that's the Brontosaurus of the new generation) made of steel ribs and fiberglass. Ian climbed up and took a ride.

The people in the shop actually had a speaker connected to a microphone inside. I had a nice little chat with Ian, in the guise of the dinosaur. In spite of all of his Disney conditioning, he wasn't sure he was comfortable with a talking dinosaur.

We enter Dinosaur National Monument. The last time we were here, Melanie was pregnant with Ian. I was actually here when I was just a bit older than Ian, way back in 1975 or 1976. Back then, they were still excavating the dinosaur quarry. Work stopped in the early 1990s, with the rationale being that further work would disturb the irreplaceable nature of the formation.

After a tram ride up, we are greeted by a friendly stegosaurus. Ian thinks this is cool, but Nathan is dubious. He's not sure he wants to have anything to do with this slightly scary thing.

He does like looking at the quarry, though. Actually, he likes looking over the balcony rail at the people below. While Nathan and I listen to a park guide talk about how the quarry was formed, Ian and Melanie go exploring.

Ian is amazed at the size of the bones. We had talked quite a bit about how both he and the dinosaurs have bones, and how the dinosaur bones turned into rock. The sheer scale of the sauropods (this is the leg bone of a fully-grown camerosaurus) impress him.

The quarry itself is one of the most amazing paleontological finds of the 20th century. Here, in the space about the size of a basketball court, are dozens of well-preserved collections of bones. When I was here as a kid, work was still progressing. You could watch the scientists as they painstakingly uncovered the bones from the surrounding material. On the left you see the spine of an adult camerosaurus, leading to the skull in the center.

Ian continues to marvel at the size of the bones. Nathan is more interested in wandering around, getting into things. He isn't yet two, but he might as well be. This is on the lower level of the quarry building.

One of the treasures from the quarry is the well-preserved skeleton of an allosaurus. Though some of the bones are replicas, most are real. Ian, of course, thinks this is a tyrannosaurus rex, so we have to show him how to count the fingers on the forelimbs. Two fingers, T-rex. Three fingers, allosaurus.

A cool thing about the quarry is the fact that you can actually touch some of the fossils. Ian asked where the blood was, so I had to explain how the bone got replaced by rock way before he was born. Not sure how much sunk in. As we were looking at this fossil, some kids came by and one remarked, "That's the leg bone of a raptor." When I pointed out that this bone was way to big to belong to that particular dinosaur, he looked hurt and said, "Well, that's what my grandpa said." His grandpa must have been clueless.

The quarry overlooks some beautiful, rugged country. I jumped off the tram to try to take a picture, and Ian went ballistic. He thought I wasn't going to ride back down with the family. The look on his face is the remnant of the fit he threw. Nathan, on the other hand, is perfectly content to play with the rock he found on the ground.

Later that evening we visited the small natural history museum in Vernal. They have a small collection of fossils, fossil casts, mounted animals, and some other natural history artifacts. Here, Ian gives us his best impression of a T-rex.

Nathan did a pretty good job staying with the family while we toured the museum. Here, he is almost relieved to see an animal he actually recognized. He is not nearly as interested in the dinosaurs as Ian is. Give him time.

Outside the museum, they have a well-groomed garden with a short "nature walk" trail with life-sized dinosaur statues. The stegosaurus is one of Ian's favorites. Since he couldn't get close to the one at the quarry, he took advantage of this time to get personal with this one.

The tyrannasaurus rex is toward the end of the loop. Ian thought it was cool. He went right up to it, walking around its legs, craning his neck to see its claws and teeth. Nathan, on the other hand, was afraid of it. He skirted the area carefully, never taking his eyes off the giant predator.

However, Nathan didn't mind the wooly mammoth. Rather out of place in a Jurassic and Cretaceous exhibit, but much more familiar, Nathan felt at home with something that looked like an elephant. Here, he poses with the hairy creature.

Our front, the family poses for one last picture. You can't see it from this angle, but the stegosaurus' tail spikes are impaled in the stomach of the big carnivore. Nice. We really enjoyed our trip to Vernal. The weather was perfect, the temperature was balmy, and the kids behaved themselves almost perfectly. It was a great trip.

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