Dinosaur National Monument - Harpers Corner Road

 

Dinosaur National Monument – Harpers Corner Road

 

Our last stop on this trip is a two-parter.  The second part will talk about seeing the dinosaur quarry, some petroglyphs, and an old homestead by quite an interesting woman.  This first part will cover our explorations down Harpers Corner Road, and a bit of a side trip down Echo Park Road.  Let’s get started!!

As we began our drive, the views were spectacular from either side of the Jeep.  On the left (upper image) was Plug Hat Butte and on the right (lower image) was the view looking out over the landscape.  How did Plug Hat get its name?  An early traveler thought this formation looked like a derby hat with the red color being the color of the band on the hat. 

The next view along the canyon road was the Escalante Overlook.  The broad valley is the Uinta Basin and is home to plants and animals from the Great Basin, Colorado Plateau and Rocky Mountains. The view is so expansive, it’s hard to believe this is in back-road country, and if you don’t head down this road, you’ll have no idea it exists.

The next great view was what’s called Canyon Overlook.  Although I shot the image on the right with my wide-angle lens as wide as I could, I couldn’t get the full view in the frame, so I took another image to capture the rock formations off to the left of the view (image on the left). 

The next view is of Vivas Cake Hill Overlook We were told in the driving guide we had that it wouldn’t be unusual to see cattle along the road, and we certainly did (see image below)!  The road shown in the image is Echo Park Road, which we’ll be heading down in just a little bit. The area we were looking out over had quite the history.  Back in the “olden days” of cowboys and cattle rustling, this canyon was part of what is known as the Outlaw Trail.  It was part of a backcountry route that ran from Montana into New Mexico and was used by many outlaws.  The most infamous of them was the Wild Bunch, led by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  Two local sisters, the Bassett befriended the Wild Bunch, and even celebrated Thanksgiving with them one year. Josie Bassett ended up marrying and moving to the base of Split Mountain (more about her in the next blog post), but Ann became the girlfriend of Butch Cassidy at age 15, and remained involved with him and the Wild Bunch for many years.  She became known as the “Queen of the Cattle Rustlers”.

The next view we had was from Island Park Overlook.  In April, 1883, Henry and May Ruple homesteaded in this area, and established a cattle ranch.  The family ran cattle from this area to Wild Mountain, about 10 miles away.  In 1915, the ranch switched over to sheep ranching when their son, Hod, took over the ranch.  The Ruples sold most of the ranch in 1945, but still maintain a portion of it, outside of the Monument.

We now approached Echo Park Overlook, and what a grad view it was!  Although you can’t see it in either of these images, the Yampa River runs through this valley, and in 1950, there was some talk of damming the river, which would have caused all of what you see here and everything I talk about in the rest of this post to be under water.  Obviously, the opposition to the dam carried the day, and we still have this wonderful area to explore!  The winding road you see in the image on the right is where we’re headed next!

Here we are at the bottom of the canyon traveling down Echo Park Road.  The road is actually in really good condition, and it quite picturesque.  What’s next to see?

Here are some views as we drove through the narrower part of the road.  The bottom image is of a butte off on our right, and not right on top of us.  However, the upper image is of the rock formations as they sort of hung over the Jeep.  I took this image while looking up out of the open roof of the Jeep.

Jack Chew and his wife settled in this area at Pool Creek in 1910, along with their 12 children and their cattle.  They build the small one room cabin which became home to them and their children.  I believe the image in the upper left is this cabin.  It was one of the first ranches in what is now Dinosaur National Monument and was home to three generations of Chews.  With hard work and the resources provided by Nature, the Chews lived here for more than half a century. The lower right image is another type of structure in what seems to be the Chew Ranch.  Mary Chew, and her sons, Rial and Douglas, managed the ranch during the 1920s.  Rial, who eventually became the sole owner, increased the ranch to more than 2,250 acres.  In the 1930s, Rail also begins raising sheep in addition to the cattle. During the 1940s, Rial and his family begin to spend winters in Vernal, UT, so his children can attend school there. In 1966, Rial sells 1,900 acres to the National Park Service that are now within Dinosaur National Monument.

Some of the rock formations were very interesting.  This formation, for example, has what appear to be clefts in the rocks.  As we looked at them, Jeff surmised that as the rain flowed from the top of the mesa/butte, it ran in the same patterns, and those patterns eventually became these clefts.  They don’t seem to go all the way through the rock – at least not yet!

The next place we stopped was at a place where there were some interesting petroglyphs up high on a rock wall. As you can see in the image in the upper left, the path was rather narrow, and the rock wall was very high.  The petroglyphs were up very high, much higher than we could reach or even see very well.  After a while, our eyes got a bit adjusted to how the petroglyphs appeared, and I was able to get some good images.  When the Fremont people made these petroglyphs, the ground was actually about 35 feet higher than it is today, and so the petroglyphs were in easy reach.  However, with the water flowing all these years, the floor of the canyon is much lower, and the petroglyphs are truly out of reach!  The two shapes we could make out were dots and chips.  The dots were made by drilling many small holes into the sandstone.  The chips were made by actually chipping away at the sandstone.  When you look closely at some of the petroglyphs, it looks like they got very accurate in both drilling and chipping.  This is the only place in Dinosaur National Monument where you can see these types of petroglyphs.

At the end of Echo Park Road, we did finally run into the Yampa River.  Although not shown in this image, very close by was a rafting outing getting ready to hit the water!  We chose to take a few minutes to simply enjoy the view before heading back the way we came.

Enjoy!