Utah

After escaping Colorado in the snow, beginning with twenty miles of disolving dirt road which covered my poor car in red-brown sludge all the way to the roof, and then wet pavement which washed the bottom half clean again, I headed west along Rt 40.

Dinosaur National Monument

Straddling the Colorado-Utah border, Dinosaur national monument takes its name from the wall of dinosaurs. This huge wall of rock, now covered by a building, is estimated to be the last 10 percent of a riverbed fossil deposit that has supplied most of the museums in the US with specimins.

Aside from the dinosaurs, the park is also a sizable and lovely nature preserve, and contains the traces of several eras of human residents, including these petroliths which are carved half-way up a tall ridge of red rock.

I want this mountain in my back yard...

North American Museum of Ancient Life

(the website has mini-games, too!) This is an excellent museum, open until 9 pm (on weeknights!) and I think it's sad that it is not closer to me. BUT-- do not attempt to use the AAA book's listing to find the place; it says that the museum is in Lehi, but if you actually get off the highway at the Lehi exit you will find that this is not the case. I drove far out of my way, and then turned around and had to stop for directions (and get a chip in my windshield sealed) and was given a copy of the Book of Mormon as a "souvenier of the state" by a man who insisted that I should be collecting a souvenier from every state I visited. It is much easier to get off at the Thanksgiving Point exit, as the museum (though not listed on the highway sign) is one of the main features of the mall-like shopping complex there.

Aside from excellent displays of fossils, the museum also has lots of fun interactive exhibits. On a Wednesday night in mid-September I practically had the place to myself, so I got to play with the design-a-dino, the erosion tank (bury plastic dinos in the tidal sands), and several other entertaining hands-on activities.

Those who know something about dinosaurs may be aware that the velociraptor, featured in Jurassic Park, was in fact about the size of a small wolf, and probably hunted in a similar fashion. When he came to make the movie, however, Spielberg was dissatisfied with this, and decided to size up his raptors to make them more intimidating. Some time shortly after this, his paleontology consultant, Bob Backer, was talking to a team that had been working out in Utah, and they described to him their new find, the Utahraptor, which was just like a Velociraptor, only significantly bigger. Backer, amazed, exclaimed, "You've found Spielberg's raptor!"

The last fossil displayed is this estimated one-year-old mammoth skeleton. It is quite small, even compared to my recollections of modern elephants.

Antelope Island State Park

Antelope Island, the largest in the Great Salt lake, was covered in sunflowers. In season the islands serve as nesting grounds for migratory birds, and Antelope Island is also large enough to have other species of wildlife, including a bison ranch of several hundred head which they round up in the winter using helicopters. The lake, formerly a much larger body of water, has salt runing into it naturally from its tributaries in large enough quantities to support extraction factories along the northern edge without bothering the ecology. Brine shrimp and a few microorginisms are about the only things that can live here.

And then to the west of the lake are the salt flats. About a hundred miles of this, all the way to the Nevada border, with absolutely nothing to see but a vast expanse of salt, occasionally punctuated by tire tracks in a big circle off-road, or a train going by. Except that just about in the middle is a huge-- statue, I guess you'd call it-- unlabled and unaccompanied by anything else, with a metal pole rising who-knows-how high supporting a giant solar-system of colored balls. And then you pass it by, it disappears into the distance, and there are more infinite salt flats, and then you get to Nevada, which goes up and down in what elsewhere would be rolling hills, only these rolling hills are a couple thousand feet high, and miles across and between. And then just as you hit California and the scenery gets interesting, it gets dark out.

In this location Carmen Sandiego would probably steal: the great salt lake