Dave had proposed visiting this out of the way Colorado/Utah park with the grandkids some time ago. We didn’t think we could handle all three but at seven, Wolfgang is old enough to appreciate ancient history or so we thought. He did like the lizards and the frogs but was less impressed with dinosaur bones even if the excavation site was pretty amazing to us old folks.
We left Rifle Gap and arrived at our riverside Green River campsite. But the river was not accessible to our site. It was about a four foot drop from the shore. One area not far from our site was a tiny rocky area for river access but it was being used by a group of campers and their dogs. Yuck.
That afternoon we stopped at the visitors center and watched the movie then read some signs and shopped in the gift store. The next day we took a short morning hike where Wolfy spotted four lizards and we took the shuttle to the indoor actual Dinosaur dig and read the history of discovery. Wolfy got bored and wanted to go back to the RV so we hung around with him watching Mindcraft videos and playing it non-stop.
The next day we took a drive to see some roadside dinosaur sights on short hikes where Wolfy’s sharp eyes saw a few more lizards. We drove the RV down a gravel road to see an old homestead ranch. Wolfy picked up some old walnuts from the ground. On the way back we stopped at a boat put-in site and spent some time lazing by the river.
The next day we left camp and stopped in town to visit a small but very well done natural history museum then spent the night at an RV park with full hookups to do some laundry and take showers.
We hung out there for awhile then drove to the Colorado entrance to the monument. There was major road construction going on for a long stretch where we had to wait quite awhile to be led by a vehicle through the broken road. There were two areas that were torn up. Afterwards we drove several miles through rolling hills and rocky canyons to get to some nice lookouts. We actually drove back across the Utah border. Several private ranches were along the road. Very remote living. We took about a ten mile gravel road down the mountain to get back to Highway 40 and back to our RV park site.
