Jones Hole Creek

The Jones Hole Creek trail is a wonderful 8-mile (round trip) hike located in the northwest corner of Dinosaur National Monument.  Vernal is an unapologetic mining town surrounded by flat gray desert, so a vivid green trout stream is a nice, unexpected surprise.  This 2,000-foot-deep gorge runs along the border between Utah and Colorado.  The trail starts just below the Jones Hole Fish Hatchery, and meanders pleasantly along the creek for about four miles to join the Green River.  The trail is fairly flat and easy to follow.

Jones Hole Creek

fish @ Jones Hole Fish Hatchery

This lush, green oasis is teaming with plants and wildlife.  Seriously, after living in the desert for five years, I'm pretty excited by clear water and critters!  I'm the world's worst fly fisher, but even I could tell this was a great trout stream. The water was crystal-clear, and you could see trout swimming and mayflies hatching.  A herd of five bighorn sheep let me watch them graze for a while.  I also saw deer, a pair of mergansers, and a rusty-colored marmot. 

About 1.7 miles south of the trailhead, you'll see a short spur trail that heads to the base of the western cliff.  This takes you to the Deluge Shelter rock art with a really vivid elk pictograph.  A little further south, there's a 0.5 mile side trail to the Ely Creek Falls.

Deluge Shelter pictograph

Finally, after 4 miles of hiking, I reached the Green River.  I wasn't sure what to expect, but it was really impressive.  The river was surrounded by soaring 2,000 foot cliffs and actually lived up to its name and looked green, instead of the sediment-laden brown I usually see back home.  I felt a weird sense of satisfaction knowing this same water would eventually flow by my home in Green River, UT -- a 4-hour drive and 226 river miles away.  I feel an epic whitewater trip brewing ...

The Green River -- 226 miles from home.

bighorn sheep

To get to the Jones Hole Creek trail, drive east out of Vernal on 500 North Street.  When the road forks, go left and follow the signs that say Jones Hole.  Follow the paved road for another 33 miles to the Jones Hole Fish Hatchery.  The trail starts at the south end of the hatchery, about two hundred yards from the visitor parking lot.

Fantasy Canyon

The sheer variety of landscapes around Vernal is pretty incredible.  Over the course of three days, I saw huge river canyons, crystal-clear trout streams, rainbow-colored desert mountains, and ... Fantasy Canyon.  This has got to be one of the most bizarre, spooky places in Utah.  It looks like a gray, filigreed Goblin Valley.

Even the drive there was bizarre.  Fantasy Canyon is about 37 miles south of Vernal, and I drove through an industrial desert landscape of oil rigs and natural gas pipelines.  The dirt was gray, the sky was gray, and the air smelled like a weird combination of natural gas, poo, and tuna.  I drove through the Uintah/Ouray Indian Reservation and saw a rotting horse carcass on the side of the road.  Lovely.  A constant stream of huge diesel trucks whizzed past me -- I'm sure there wasn't another Chevy Aveo for 100 miles.  It was all very weird and ominous, which definitely set the right tone.

I finally reached the parking area for Fantasy Canyon, which was totally unexpected.  The desert was gray and featureless for miles, then suddenly this gargoyle garden popped up.  The area was really small, but it was packed with layers of fragile rock formations.  Fantasy Canyon's rocks were deposited during the Eocene Epoch, 38 to 50 million years ago.  At that time, the Uinta Basin was covered by an enormous lake.  The sand and dirt at the lake bottom eventually compacted into rocks.  As the stones weathered at different rates, these weird rocks formations emerged from the landscape.  (Sound familiar?  It's pretty much exactly what happened at Goblin Valley.)  I spent an hour poking around, then drove back to civilization.

Dinosaur National Monument

After over four years in Utah and loads of epic weekends, I feel like I’ve at least done a cursory exploration of most of the major geographic regions in the state.  One of my favorite nerdy pleasures is unfolding a map and re-tracing roads and trails in my mind.  But there are still some big blank spots I haven't explored, including the area around Dinosaur National Monument.  Coincidentally, I had a work thing up in Vernal this week (the opening of the new Field House curational facility!) so I jumped at the chance to check out Dinosaur NM and the surrounding area.  Jordan had to go back to work, so this trip did double duty as my last solo weekend before we get married (one month -- holy sh*t!)

For as much as I knock National Park "windshield tours," that's always what I end up doing the first time I visit one.  I guess it's just a good way to get an overview of the place, knock out all the cheeseball sites, and scope out good places to dig a little deeper.  So the first thing I did at Dinosaur was visit the Quarry Exhibit Hall, which showcases a wall of 1,500 embedded dinosaur bones.  The entire back wall of the building is a quarry site full of fossils.  These bones are in such great condition -- many of the skeletons are nearly complete and arranged in the correct anatomical position.  Jordan and I get pretty excited finding tiny little bone shards when we're out hiking, so I can't imagine finding something like this!

camarasaurus skull

quarry wall

The Quarry Hall is what drew me to Dinosaur National Monument in the first place, but of course there's a lot more to see.  The landscape is a contorted rainbow of uplifted rock carved into steep canyons by the Green and Yampa Rivers.  Whitewater rafting is a big deal in Dinosaur NM, and I can see why.  From origins high in the Rocky Mountains, the Green and Yampa Rivers wind across sagebrush plains, then squeeze into tight canyons surrounding by soaring cliffs.  The wild Yampa is the last un-dammed river in the Colorado River system, and it has some crazy Class V rapids.  The Green is little more manageable with Class II-IV rapids.  Of course, it's tough to get your hands on a permit, but I'm definitely going to try!

Green River from the Split Mountain overlook

Green River from Jones Hole

Echo Park Overlook

Dinosaur NM is also full of incredible petroglyphs and pictographs.  I've seen a lot of rock art in Utah, but the classic Vernal style is really distinct.  These images were created by the Fremont people around 800-1,200 years ago.  The figures tend to be trapezoid-shaped anthropomorphs with elaborate headdresses, necklaces, and earrings.  It's impossible to know exactly what rock art represents, but to me these figures seem a lot more war-like and foreboding.  Many of them are carrying shields and what look like decapitated human heads.  Spooky, but really cool.

McKee Spring Petroglyphs

lizard rock art along Cub Creek

map credit:  nps.gov

Pronghorn

Sweet!  On my way home from work yesterday, I saw four pronghorn crossing the road.  The females start dropping their fawns at the end of May, and the babies are always ridiculously cute.  They’re definitely one of my favorite animals out at Goblin Valley – every time I see them I’m amazed how they thrive in such a hot, dry place.

(photo credit:  http://www.ca.uky.edu/forestryextension/ThomasBarnes2.php)

Ready for a naturalist geek-out?  So glad you asked …

Pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) are really amazing, beautiful animals.  They live on open plains, where they graze on shrubs, forbs, and grasses.  When threatened, they can run up to 65 mph, which makes them the second fastest land animal after the cheetah.   Pronghorn need wide open spaces to thrive – although they’re able to leap across 8-foot barriers, they usually crawl under barbed-wire fences.

Male pronghorn.  (Photo credit:  http://www.flickriver.com/photos/phlog/)

Pronghorn are often confused with antelope.  However, true antelope are only distantly related to pronghorn – they aren’t even in the same family.  True antelope are Old World mammals that belong to the Bovidae family.  Antelope have unbranching horns that are made of keratin, grow on a bony core, and never shed.

Blackbuck antelope.  (Photo credit:  http://vijaycavale.blogspot.com)

True old world antelope. (Photo credit:  http://www.indianwildlife.org/India-Antelopes.html)

Pronghorn, on the other hand, belong to the Antilocapridae family and are only found in North America.  All the other species in this family are extinct, so they don’t have any close relatives.  The pronghorn horn consists of an outer sheath of hairlike substance that grows around a bony core.  This sheath is shed every year.

Hairlike sheath. (Photo credit: https://skullsunlimited.com/record_species.php?id=3779)

  

When Lewis and Clark first explored the western United States in 1805, more than 35 million pronghorn wandered the plains.  By 1900, their numbers had plummeted to only 13,000. New protections and stricter hunting regulations allowed their population to bounce back to about 750,000 animals today.

Gobliny pronghorn