Dinosaur National Monument

Who doesn’t like dinosaurs!

We visited the Dinosaur National Monument in June 2023 and then again in June 2024 while staying at the Fossil Valley RV Park in the nearby town of Vernal, Utah.

The park includes a range of scenery, with mountains, deserts, rivers, and canyons all visible or accessible from the park roads. There are Petroglyphs that reveal the lives and connections of Indigenous people to this land. There are also remains of cabins and farming installations that date from the late 19th and early 20th century homesteaders and outlaws that found refuge here.

The park has two visitor centers. During our visits, we started at the Quarry Visitor Center near Jensen, Utah, at the southwest corner of the park. The second visitor center, the Canyon Visitor Center, is in Dinosaur, Colorado.

The highlight of our first visit was the Quarry Exhibit Hall, a separate building near the Quarry Visitor Center that allows visitors to view the wall of approximately 1,500 dinosaur bones in a large, well-lit building with supporting exhibits and informational displays. Here, you can gaze upon the remains of numerous species of dinosaurs from the Late Jurassic period, including Allosaurus, Apatosaurus, Camarasaurus, Diplodocus, and Stegosaurus, among others.

After we visited the Quarry Exhibit Hall, we drove the 10-mile paved Tour of Tilted Rocks, which included sweeping geology, historic homesteads, petroglyphs and pictographs, hiking trails, campgrounds, and scenic vistas. This road ends at the Josie Bassett Morris cabin built in 1913. When we returned for our second visit in June 2024, we spent half a day at the Josie Morris cabin site and took the two short canyon hikes nearby. Allen was fascinated by the history and legends surrounding Josie Morris, and you can read his post about our visit to her cabin and the surrounding area here.

Photos of our visits are provided below. Click on the thumbnails to view the photos.