Friday - part 2 - drive on the "Tour of Tilted Rocks"

After our visit to the Quarry Exhibit Hall on Friday, we decided to make a drive on the dinosaur side of the park. They have an auto tour called, "Tour of Tilted Rocks" (https://www.nps.gov/dino/planyourvisit/tour-of-tilted-rocks.htm). We got an Auto Tour Guide booklet in the Visitor's Center. The tour was very interesting - primarily due to petroglyphs, pictographs, and information about recent residents of this area.

Our first stop was to see petroglyphs and pictographs by the Fremont people - they were the same ones who they think created the petroglyphs down near Echo Park that we visited a couple of days ago.  http://trekincartwrights.blogspot.com/2018/06/dinosaur-national-monument-day-2.html

Some of these had color - pictographs.

Reminds me of E.T.

In this one you can see some of the red color.

At the next stop, we saw some mountains that gave the reason for the title of the tour - tilted rocks...

Split Rock mountain - and the parking lot for Split Rock Campground (a group campground) down below.

The Green River as it flows by Split Rock Campground (a little upstream from where we are camping).

We drove on to another overlook. We had visited the remnants of the Crew Ranch on our drive to Echo Park. Descendants of the Crews still ranch across the river from Green River Campground where we are staying.

The view from the overlook. The cottonwood trees that are closer are part of the Green River campground (on "this" side of the river - where we are staying) - the green irrigated field is part of the Crew's ranch on the other side of the river.

The tram driver who took us to the Quarry Exhibit Hall told us a story about the rancher - he said that many years ago, there was no bridge from the Monument side of Green River to the ranch side, so the rancher would ride his horse out to the road (maybe US 40?) to a place where he kept his vehicle parked. After some years, he got an airplane that he would fly from the ranch to Vernal, where his family lived. One day, a wind storm came up and tossed the airplane along the ground damaging it enough that he could no longer fly, so he was back to using horse and truck to visit his family.

Now there is a bridge across the Green River which we used to get over to see the remainder of the tour.

More examples of "tilted rocks" on our drive.

More petroglyphs from the Fremont people. I'm starting to think that they were graffiti artists!

 

Closeup 1 on this rock... is the object on the left a flower vase with the roots growing out the bottom?

Closeup 2

A different rock - I have called this one "Jazz hands"

Then we drove around the corner - the booklet said that we could hike up a pretty steep path to see the petroglyphs, or that we could see them from the parking area with binoculars, or possibly with the naked eye...

When we got there, we weren't sure what we were looking for... and the day had become hot enough that the prospect of hiking up a steep incline wasn't appealing... so we used the binoculars... but we weren't sure what we were looking for...

A guy and his two boys were already on their way up, and he seemed to know what he was looking for, so we watched them - do you see him - a figure in blue - in the middle of the photo in front of a dark spot on the cliff face?

They were taking pictures there - can you see one of the lizards carved into the dark spot that is just above them?

Here it is zoomed in some more - there are actually 3 lizards - one is pretty obvious, on a diagonal axis from lower left to upper right. Another is straight up and down just in front of the head of the diagonal one... the third one is directly below the diagonal one and hard to see in this picture - it is at the same level as the dad's torso.

Here they are zoomed in more. The other animals/creatures are pretty stylized, but these lizards really look like lizards to me!

There was one other that we wanted to see - it is in the left middle toward the top of this picture (between the boy and his dad but about twice as high on the rock face as the dad is tall).

Zooming in - it is said to be a flute player - isn't that cool?

One of the things that the booklet pointed out was that these drawings are evidence that these people weren't struggling to just survive or subsist - they had time to indulge in creative activities.

At the end of the tour, we came to the homestead of Josie Morris.

She seemed to be quite the character...

 I've taken pictures from the content of a brochure that we picked up at the Visitor's Center with information about her:

Regarding the statement about her being tried and acquitted twice - we heard a story that Josie would rustle her neighbors' cattle (even though she had cattle of her own), butcher them, and take the meat and vegetables from her own garden to others in the area who were starving and not able to do for themselves - recently come Mormon settlers. The reason supposed for her acquittal was that, in providing a "jury of her peers" in the trials, at least one of the people on each jury would be someone who had received a benefit from her, or who was related to someone who had, so the juries would never be able to come to a unanimous decision to convict her and sentence her to hanging. The story was that the accusers had even dug up on her land the hides of the animals that she had rustled and slaughtered, with the brands of the other ranchers, but still she was not found guilty! A Robin Hood in skirts?

Regarding her death: We also saw another write-up that said that she fell when her horse nudged her with his nose and she slipped on ice and broke her hip - at age 89. She dragged herself to her cabin, and a few days later, friends checked on her and found her laid up in her cabin. When they took her to the hospital, she said that she feared that she would never be able to return to her life on her homestead, and unfortunately, that became true as she passed away just a few months later.

Coming up to the cabin. She had built more than one cabin on this site - I think the information said that this one was built in the 1930s.

It has been shored up and repaired.

I was surprised at how many windows were in the cabin. I would think that would make it colder in the winter. But, another story we heard was that she did not sleep in the cabin, but rather slept in the lean-to on the side.

There were a few stiles around the yard area - to allow easy passage for humans through the fence but to keep livestock out.

We enjoyed the drive and learning more about the area on this side of Dinosaur National Monument.