After a successful day on BLM land surrounding Fort Pearce I slept well at my little campsite. Although I woke up in the night to the sound of rain and high wind, by morning the clouds has mostly blown away and I made coffee and breakfast in bright sunshine.
When I packed up my camp I headed deeper into BLM land instead out back towards St. George. The reason? The day before I saw a sign in the road that said “DINOSAUR TRACKS” with a large arrow.
When I was a kid I wasn’t really in to dinosaurs. I liked the Jurassic Park movies, but that’s about as far as my love of dinosaurs goes. And still – I wasn’t about to pass up a chance to see dinosaur tracks.
Luckily the parking lot ended up being just another mile or so up the road. No signs existed at the trailhead but the trail itself was pretty obvious, heading down into a dry wash. After about a quarter mile I could see a sign and headed over to check it out.
I don’t know why Fort Pearce didn’t get a single sign, but I’m happy that the dinosaur tracks sign was a wealth of information.
The area I stood on is currently called the Warner Valley. Millions of years ago (in the Early Jurassic Period) this area was a broad floodplain. It was also home to dinosaurs.
I have to be honest with you – I found the tracks pretty mind-blowing. These tracks are almost 200 million years old. I stood there for a while, just kind of, you know, marveling. 200 million years.
There were two main types of tracks at the site. The larger ones were easier for me to spot and most likely belonged to a dinosaur called Dilophosaurus.
As you can see in the picture above, Dilophosaurus was a meat-eater, bipedal, and had a rather ginormous head.
The smaller tracks most likely belonged to a dinosaur called Megapnosaurus, whose name literally translates to “Big Dead Lizard.”
I took a few photos of the Megapnosaurus tracks but they didn’t turn out as well. Or maybe since they were smaller I somehow found them less impressive?
Nope. I just didn’t manage to take a good photo. Hey, you win some, you lose some.
I hung out at the dinosaur tracks for a long time. Supposedly over 400 tracks have been discovered at this site – it would have been a muddy, wet area 200 million years ago and dinosaurs traveled through it frequently. A lot of the rock was now covered in sand, though, so it felt like I only saw a handful of tracks. Still, it was just so mind-boggling to think that dinosaurs once walked where I was standing.
At some point, though, I realized the sun was getting high in the sky and I needed to get moving on. You see, I had a plan.
I’d spent part of last night lamenting that I’d given up on Capitol Reef because of cold weather. Capitol Reef is one of my favorite National Parks (Canyonlands, also in Utah, is my absolute favorite). I wanted to see those red rock walls and slot canyons again and I felt guilty about being such a cold wimp.
Then a solution hit me. I could drive up there (it was only about 3 hours away), hike in the afternoon. Even if I couldn’t cook a meal – so what! I could still get up the next morning, go for another hike, and be back in balmy St. George by dinnertime.
And then I realized that I could stock up on stuff like sandwiches (and other foods I didn’t have to, you know, cook) at a grocery on my way up to Capitol Reef. Even if it was so cold that I had to eat sitting in the truck with the heat on, I could still eat a couple of decent meals.
I stopped at the first grocery I came across, a chain called Lin’s, and stocked up on chicken salad wraps, hard-boiled eggs, and guacamole and a bag of tortilla chips.
Game on, Capitol Reef.