Just across the Utah/Colorado state line, past the derelict town of Dinosaur, CO, we found the turn off to the entrance of the East Section of Dinosaur National Monument. We'd driven past miles of industrial scenery, oil rigs and storage tanks, followed lines of double-tanker trucks hauling oil to processing sites, and through a Ute reservation that symbolized the demonstrated condition of many Indian reservations I've witnessed over the years. It's clear that the people on the reservation do not share in the oil wealth of this landscape. Past the third cannabis dispensary with no grocery store or shop of any kind in sight, we made the turn and pulled on to the single paved road into the monument.
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| Oil and natural gas is a growing industry in the Uinta Basin |
This section of the national monument had a very different feel. Geologically it was more expansive and featured the great wide open spaces of the Colorado Plateau, overwhelming in its scale and beauty. Yet it felt a little sad, too. We got out to stretch our legs on a short trail that followed the rim of the Plug Hat Butte and began to feel the altitude almost right away. Huffing and puffing to follow a flat trail, my adult grandchild from Delaware realized the rest of our visit to this high, windy, even chilly country would be different from the dry, hot desert on the Utah side as they experienced their first real encounter with being nearly at tree line.
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| Feeling the rise |
We explored a Pinyon Pine forest and looked across broad canyons from the mesa top. We sat on a conveniently placed bench and caught our breath. We watched as a few cars wound their way down the park road to the bottom. Clearly this was the far less visited part, distinctly more remote. Even after appreciating the beauty of the red and yellow banded canyons and excited to see some wildlife, it still felt a little sad. Maybe some leftover feelings from driving through what remains of Dinosaur (the town) and the reservation's impoverished landscape?
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| Mule deer buck |
At this altitude we should have been seeing some wildflowers blooming but saw basically nothing. I follow some Utah hiking groups on social media and was pining to see the high mountains in bloom as people were posting this week of incredible flowering happening high up. Other than Greasewood, Sagebush, and scrub, however, there was very little color, let alone flowers to enjoy. Then I figured it out - this section of the park is grazed by a local ranchers large wandering herds of cattle - we stopped several times to let them cross the road. I have nothing against ranchers , don't get me wrong, but it was here I saw the starkness of close cropped grazing lands where all the tender grasses and wildflowers are nipped to the ground.
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| At 8,000 feet |
I was reminded of my travels in Wisconsin, near the home of Aldo Leopold in Madison, who travelled out into the landscape with his students to search for remnant prairies on the edges of progress and settlement. Finding only small patches of prairie wildflowers in the corners of fenced-in cemeteries or along the scrubby edge of railroad tracks, he imagined these places full of late summer wildflowers where once great herds of American Bison roamed.
"What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked" (A Sand County Almanac)
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| Cushion Buckwheat |
At various pull-outs we enjoyed the views but I also did some sleuthing. Cattle plops were everywhere and except for a few very small groupings of Cushion Buckwheat, the dusty ground offered mounds of Cheatgrass, a non-native invasive found across the Southwestern rangelands. Despite the NPS's attempts to eradicate it, Cheatgrass has taken over the high hills and slopes where non-native cattle graze everything else into oblivion. There was no perennial herbaceous cover that I could find at the four stops we made.
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| Pinyon Pine |
Though prescribed fire is one tactic we can take here in the East (where I live) to control non-native invasive plants, this same treatment in the West on rangeland can make the problem of Cheatgrass so much worse. Post-fire environments, whether prescribed or wild, in the DNM are predominantly overtaken by Cheatgrass on high slopes, south-facing hillsides, and open high plains. Sherill & Romme, in their 2012 study of the semi-arid DINO region within DNM, found in their baseline study that Cheatgrass is thriving under conditions of a warming world, and that increased wildfire risk is a recipe for increased Cheatgrass dominance over native plants, particularly wildflowers. (See Notes)
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| From the Ruple Point Trail |
In the midst of our wandering up the long road to Harpers Corner, we felt our altitude-induced headaches a little more with each mile. A small herd of Pronghorn and a magnificent 8-point Mule Deer emerged from the Sagebrush, but black Angus cattle were everywhere on their summer grazing land. We tried to imagine Native People coming to these highlands to hunt and gather in summer, a land not quite as barren like it is today, but definitely not livable come winter. I asked Koda to imagine the scene of a thousand years ago. Were they collecting cones and berries and sweet herbs? Were they hunting bison, who like the cattle of today, certainly wandered over these windy slopes for summer forage?
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| Black-Eared Jack Rabbit dug out |
With Koda's headache intensifying we decided to turn around before reaching the end of the park road at Harpers Corner and luckily the pain and throbbing decreased with every mile down. We stopped at a pull out picnic area for a bathroom break and I wandered out to the Ruple Trail for a few minutes to stretch my legs. Western wildfire haze muted the view across the canyons but I did find a Black Eared Jackrabbit dug-out under a dead Pinyon Pine log and Sagebrush. When backed out of our parking spot, the Jackrabbit popped up from a nearby Sagebrush and leaped on to the trail I'd just left - no doubt headed back to the safety and warmth of his dug-out.
Having a close-up encounter with the Jackrabbit, I thought about Ann Zwinger (1925-2014), celebrated Utah nature writer who authored The Near-Sighted Naturalist (1998) that I had downloaded on to my e-reader for the trip out west. I was a little disappointed we hadn't hiked more on our last evening outing in Utah but Koda's first time elevation headache took priority. While we rested at the Visitor Center at the bottom of the hill (and Koda found the bookshop there to be excellent, btw) I tucked into Zwinger as we acclimated again to lower elevation.
"In wandering there is great reassurance, for it is then that one fits into the continuum of a larger world, a world which for the naturalist has no beginning and no end. We all need to know there is purpose and worth and reason in living. A naturalist finds these in the sibilant logic of saltating sand grains spinning into a dune, in the spiked spoke pattern of a cactus, in the hexagonal mud cracks in a dry arroyo, in bee-beset willow catkins, and in the clouds that curtain a Western summer sky with virga."
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| Virga beneath the clouds |
The sadness lifted as I felt our afternoon of wandering had indeed held a deep sense of meaning to me and Koda, even if some of what we discovered was not an ideal find (the lack of wildflowers and abundance of Cheatgrass). But we learned so much about the landscape by just riding upon it that its past and maybe its future were somehow revealed and prompted new questions, that promised more wandering to find answers.
"Where else can one range so widely and wander so happily into archeology and anthropology, biology and botany, geology and history, taxonomy and zoology? This is precisely what makes natural history a far-ranging and fascinating discpline for its practitioners - those batty people who like to tie together yesterday and tomorrow within the framework of today's natural world in which man walks, crabs scuttle, lizard leaps, jackrabbit bounds, and beetle trundles."
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Notes:
Kirk Sherrill and William Romme (2012) "Spatial variation of post-fire Cheatgrass: Dinosaur National Monument." https://fireecology.springeropen.com/articles/10.4996/fireecology.0802038
Ann Swinger https://a.co/d/0xSh6qY
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