Visiting Dinosaur National Monument: Secret River, Hidden Caves, Facing Fear

Visiting Dinosaur National Monument was worth doing: the petroglyphs, secret canyons, the desert itself drew me. I admit I was scared…for one thing I hadn’t camped in years and years. But there was more. This was the first such trip in a long time where I would be in charge. The family had visited before, on a day trip out of Steamboat Springs, and had seen both the fossil quarry and the slot canyons and cliff paintings.

But on this trip, we were camping. The meal plan, the map, the reservations, the things we would do were on me. Due to recent family changes (divorce) I wasn’t sure I would be able to get through it all. I silently acknowledged to myself that I was, possibly, a kind of wimp, the kind of wimp who’s secretly scared to go some places without a man. And camping was one of those places.

This is one more version of despair. You’re afraid stuff will happen to you if you try to go outside your circle alone.

To Be Honest, I was Scared

It was scary to head out there, into the desert on the border of Utah and Colorado. I already knew that there was basically no motels, supermarkets … the closest gas station from the park was ten miles. … I had to get everything right. And yet we hadn’t gone camping in years. Visiting Dinosaur National Monument was, perhaps, a leap of faith. I had wished to do something closer to home. We had to drive eight hours to get to Dinosaur. But the supply of Dark Sky Parks was thin around Denver.

This may seem ridiculous, but I was even more scared to go to Great Sand Dunes National Park, the other “local” Dark Sky opportunity. And camping? It was a budgetary decision, mostly.

In the old days when we camped, my ex-husband Leo used to be there. Or my father. I don’t remember camping alone except one other time, when a massive thunderstorm downed our tent and made us sleep in the car. That’s what happens, I thought at the time, when a woman runs a camping trip.

But I had to do this, I had to take my son Andrew on his 20th birthday trip. We’d taken time off work, I’d reserved a campsite, I’d told my friends. We drove seven hours into the west, in the direction of the setting sun. We arrived at Green River Campground, just at dusk, and managed to pitch our two tents, make a fire and cook hot dogs, and then sleep. I had to admit it was a serene and beautiful site. The river curls around the campsites, and the ground was sandy and easy to pitch a tent on. Unfortunately the sky was cloudy, so we couldn’t see the stars in the dark night sky dark night sky yet.

In the morning I suggested we go hiking. Andrew didn’t want to hike. Instead, he wanted to go off-roading with our 4 wheel drive SUV, which I’d acquired not for “doing it in the dirt” as the bumper stickers say but for those early morning snow storms in Colorado. Was I scared? Of course. What if there were cliffs out there? For some reason, I am ten times more scared of being in a car that drives off a cliff than falling off of one on foot. But I bravely agreed, since it was his birthday, and we stopped by Utah Tourism Information, got beginners directions and advice, and drove out into a dirt road. Visiting Dinosaur National Monument was now going to take a turn on wheels.

Our informant at the Utah Tourism Office recommended we try driving a dirt road that led off Harper’s Corner Road (a scenic drive in itself) down Echo Park Road into the canyon of the Green river. The road descended via switchback down steep slopes; and above and sometimes below were cliffs. I felt I had to drive, I couldn’t deal with my fear of going over the edge if I was riding in the passenger seat.

I explained this to Andrew and he understandingly allowed me to get behind the wheel, and I let off the brake, picking my way down the hill at 8 miles per hour, finally arriving at the bottom in a canyon where we could almost touch red sandstone walls the color of rusted ships. Once at the bottom, the car splashed through creeks and the road went slightly tilted as we navigated more switchbacks. There was no one out there. We saw just two other vehicles in an afternoon. What would happen if we broke down? If we crashed? Went over the edge?

Like being a divorced lady, it was all too scary. And I traveled so many miles next to my husband it was weird to be riding next to my son into a wilderness of the unknown. I thought “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

Why couldn’t I trust the universe? Why did I consider myself alone even though I was with my son? What was this twisted thinking I’d allowed myself to develop?

As I drove, I glanced out at the rocks so high above me and vaguely hoped none of them would fall, then went into acceptance. “Well, if they fall, they fall.” The road passed underneath overhangs and across sandy stretches where I imagined our SUV sliding to a stop, the wheels spinning in the sand. The desert is a mystery to me.

And believe me I was afraid.

Deep in the canyon, we came across petroglyphs carved into the red stone. A rivulet of water ran below them, and a little copse of trees sprung up around it, an cool oasis in the August sun that glanced off canyon walls around us.

I thought about the ancient people that lived here in the desert, the Fremont, also known as the Anasazi, and these their petroglyphs. These stone age works prefigure art such as paintings, poetry, and photographs. Most of the history of these ancient artists went over a metaphorical cliff edge, with all their days and all their actions forgotten. Today we have only these mysterious glyphs: a picture of a woman in a headdress and a sketch of a lizard, a man holding a spear, to lend us some extraordinarily vague understanding of what it was to be alive a thousand years ago in this place.

In this desert country of slot canyons, I thought about how my own life would be forgotten.

T. S. Eliot wrote that “human voices wake us and we drown.” If that is true, then perhaps the voice of nature wakes us and we stop drowning. The image of Steamboat Rock, pictured below, has stayed with me since we arrived there, an image of natural majesty that somehow counteracts all the dross of my negative memories.

When we got to the bottom of the canyon, we reached Echo Park, the confluence of the Green and the Yampa rivers. This is the source of the largest tributary of the Colorado River. There in front of us was a hairpin turn of the river, and a towering rock in the middle in the shape of a steamboat, soaring 300 feet in height. The water was running swiftly and I watched a man and woman in a rubber raft who pulled up on the opposite bank and went hiking along the side of the rock.

Jealousy Rears Its Ugly Head

They were, I must assume, in that magical country defined on Facebook as In A Relationship, walking by the river of dreams. And I was in exile. In the desert. Alone. Experiencing jealousy. But only for a moment. Suddenly I felt a sense of resignation and acceptance. I could have brought Leo here with me after all. He could have driven down that narrow road, and I could have dealt with all the emotional pique and random mischances and unwelcome verbal explosions that having him around always brought. I was incredibly tired but I was also at peace. Cool air blew up from the river. An otherworldly beauty surrounded us.

Just up from Steamboat Rock we stopped to look in Wind Cave and I felt the cool breezes as they came from a secret shaft far away, whistling like ghosts. I felt for a second the terror of how much rock was over my head, and of the dark corners of the cave. But I took a deep breath and waited until Andrew had seen enough of the strange, split rock path with the ceiling that went far far up into the dark.

When we got out I turned from the river and the rock and I said “Andrew you drive the way back up.”

As I sat down in the passenger side, I worried for a moment that he would let some calamity befall us. There could be cliffs, or rock crushings. But I was so tired from driving and being alone in the world and worrying about not having a man in my life that I just closed my eyes and breathed really deep.

Andrew got behind the wheel and the SUV rocked over the ruts on the hills in low gear. I put my head back against the headrest and the burden of being responsible for everything in this trip, the food, the tents, the reservations, the gasoline, the route, everything, somehow fell away. It went down over my shoulder and landed in the dusty road and was forgotten and I went to sleep and Andrew drove that SUV all the way up the canyon, past caves, past cliffs, past the switchbacks and onto the tableland called Split Mountain where there was a state road which was paved. I opened my eyes and there he was driving.

“Well look at that,” I thought. “Here I had believed that you could only trust a man if you were In a Relationship with him or he was your father. But you can also trust a man if he’s your son.”

I admit my understanding of men remains impoverished, but I do think I’m right about one thing. I can trust Andrew.

In the map below, I marked our off-road route in yellow.

In the evening the skies were clear and we lay on our backs and looked up at the millions of stars and saw even the Milky Way and several falling stars. Andrew put on his headphones and listened to some new music he had downloaded onto his iphone that he assured me I didn’t want to listen to. I felt at peace in the universe.

Like the worries that had fallen into the road, I dropped my highly developed conception of the wife, mother and Ideal Person I was supposed to be. None of this self image I had dreamed up over the years was really necessary. All that was necessary was that end part, “to be,” in this universe. With all the infinite stars shining down, like the Fremont people, the universe needed no record of my existence for any of it to have meaning. The earth could keep going and I just had to go along with it, and do my small part. It was okay for me just to be me. I could let go of all the rest and let it take care of itself.

That is what I learned by visiting Dinosaur National Monument.