A simply fun day! We started out by heading back into Dinosaur NM with the goal of completing a lot of the smaller hikes on the west side. We began one that promised to be 5 miles. It was full of little mishaps from the get go. The girls and I were prepared for really low key walks and wore our hiking sandals instead of our hiking boots. This caused tons of small, sharp pebbles to enter our shoes causing each step to be painful. Also, I had just eaten a small bowl of raisin bran at breakfast which did not provide me with the energy needed to keep moving forward in the heat. After breaking for a while and inhaling trail mix, I was feeling a bit better. Finally, our navigation skills once again failed us and we thought we were on a dry creek bed as opposed to the trail so we turned around and headed back to the car. (Turns out the dry creek bed was the trail! Oh well.)
Further down the road, we did a couple of miles on a perfect desert hike. Lots of sun, heat, desert animals and plants. It was beautiful, and quite straining. We didn’t see any one else on either of the hikes and that always adds so much to the experience. Makes me so thankful that we have access to such solitude.
We continued our Dinosaur NM experience with a visit at the Josie Morris cabin. This woman is my idol!! When she turned forty she found herself divorced with grown children. So she built a freaking ranch in the middle of nowhere in the 1920s. At that point she had already been divorced FOUR times and clearly didn’t need a man to do anything. She built the home and other structures like a chicken coop herself. She was a rancher and even was tried for stealing cattle in her 60s. She also made wine and brandy during prohibition. This woman didn’t let anything stop her. She lived on the ranch for almost 50 years, all on her own, kicking ass at life.
One final stop in the park led us to more petroglyphs. I’m not sure I could ever tire looked at these. The Fremont people lived in this area for 600 years and no one knows at what point in that period these were created.
Once we left the park I did the driving to Orem. We found cold Goose Island IPA at a gas station and had a delightful evening swimming until an even better dinner at In ‘N Out.
So glad you guys are having a great time. Pardon my ignorance, and I suppose I could google it, but what is a Petroglyphs?
Carry on to your adventure. And be careful. There are no stinging critters in those deserts, are there?
Blessings,
Joanie Kenning
X-guard.