Friday, April 25. 2008--Colorado National Monument

Friday was a normal day--thank heavens! We went for a short hike to the visitor center. The first part of the hike was Windowrock Trail which is only .3 mile long. This feature is called Windowrock since the rock has eroded and frames the valley below.The trail was a nice one with views of the valley and the town of Fruita.

We enjoyed our morning hike. It was relaxing after the mishaps or the previous day.
From Windowrock Trail we hiked to Book Cliffs View. The building at the overlook is on the National Historic Register. It would be a great place to watch a sunrise, but we don't get up that early!From Book Cliffs View we hiked to the visitor center along Canyon Rim Trail. Once again we saw great views of Independence Monument, Praying Hands, Organ Pipe, and Kissing Couple.
The trail to the visitor center was paved part of the way. We took our time in the visitor center, reading displays and watching the informational movie about the area.

The return trail took us through small pinyon pines and Utah junipers. It amazes us how trees can grow in such a rocky, arid place. The trees seem to come up out of rock, but every now and then when we're in a valley, we see the roots protruding through the rock!

For the afternoon we decided to geocache in the park. Our first find was near Balance Rock. The rock weighs over 500 tons! We're not sure how they weighed it, but we hope it stays balanced while we're driving near it!

From there we drove out of the park and found Dinosaur Hill which is maintained by Bureau of Land Management (BLM). An apatosaurus skeleton was found here in 1901. There is a mile trail around the area.
The apatosaurus skeleton was moved to the Field Museum of Chicago where it is still on display. This plaque commemorates Elmer Riggs who was responsible for the find.

We drove back into Colorado National Monument to find 3 other caches. We have to e-mail answers to questions to get credit for these caches so watch our cache totals to see when the number increases.

Saturday will be our last day at the park before we head to Dinosaur National Monument. Hopefully the weather channel is correct when it says the winds will be 7 mph from the south! We are really tired of the wind. We feel like we have been in wind since we started this leg of our trip.