Dinosaur's ROCK

Today our coach received its new heat protector switch (the old one jammed and was the cause of the fridge malfunction) and we decided to have two new 130 watt solar panels attached to the roof and added in series to the factory installed 100 watt unit. This meant we replaced the former controller with a bigger one.

The batteries only received a couple of sunlit hours this evening but are already loving the extra juice and our coach is much easier to keep comfortable and well lit when boon-docking.  The fridge is cooling down
                                                      now.  We'll know if all is well when we open it tomorrow morning, but
                                                      all seems fine.


We're parked at Parker United Methodist Church tonight, just south of Denver.  Quiet, comfortable. TY Rebecca and the Parker UMC Trustees!!!




This afternoon, just a couple of miles from Camping World and our repairs, was a 100.000.000 year old time machine.  Dinosaur Ridge State Park.  On a north-south ridge first bisected by east-west Interstate 70 in 1970 geologists and paleontologists have found a wonderful way to show the modern world what happened over the span of several aeons of ancient earth. From the time when a great seaway covered what we now know as the Great Plains and lower Rockies forward.



Kayla was our guide in her own wonderful machine, an electric group-size golf cart.  She is a student at the Golden, CO, School of Mines and hopes to be a research geo-engineer at graduation.  She loves her subject, and was able to answer most every question my fertile little mind could toss at her.

We rode the cart up the incline road reserved for hikers, bikers and us from stop to stop where we could see, touch, and learn about each
                                                      epoch and what animals lived at this
                                                      place in it.

Did you know Alligators once lived in Colorado?  Though a bit hard to see in the small photo to the left, scientists have decided the parallel vertical scratch marks left in the center of this now rock slope were placed there by the scraping of two front feet of a giant alligator when this was a mud flat that got covered quickly with some kind of debris which preserved the marks.

The other short 'line' depressions are marks left by fallen plant life, sticks and branches of the alligators habitat.

 Here Kayla is showing us the 'bone yard'.  A collection of Jurassic period bones of all types collected at a place where possibly a river or flood deposited them.

The bones are the darker masses within the lighter rock.

 At another location Kayla pointed out something I had never seen or heard of before. Some dino footprints are saved from the bottom up.  In this case, imagine yourself walking across a muddy flat.  Your feet sink in, depressing the layers of mud.  It dries and several million years later some nosy scientist digs across your path and discovers the depressed mud, now filled in with sediment, showing how deep your feet sank, which, along with the length of your tread, helps determine your weight.

There is NO peace for a weight watcher, is there?

Finally Kayla took us to the foot print beach.  Here, for all time, are the preserved, and charcoal hi-lighted, footprints of bird like creatures and larger dinosaurs that exist now only in the DNA memories of some birds and other creatures.


Where will we have trod that others may find our steps preserved and know that we were here?

Perhaps in the directions our children take, and the actions of those who follow us.

We call that 'legacy'. These ancient creatures could not leave us much, but they have left us proof of their existence.

What proof of our existence will outlive us?

And will it be a 'proof' our grandkids will be proud to claim?

-Ken