One of the Arizona Strip's Gems.

There has been almost an eight week lapse in our postings.  Up until about the end of September it was a choice not to write.  There simply was nothing but the same old thing; check campers in, check campers out, clean fire pits.  Same ol', same ol'.  After almost five months of camp hosting at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon there is not a lot of fresh things to write about the volunteer work. 

But now, near the end of September, our co-hosts, Gary and Jo are about to wrap up their six weeks at the North Rim.  We have been working out strategies for getting his rig out of the half of the camp host site he is in.  They are in the position we were in last year.  They too have a relatively long fifth wheel trailer. 

This is the camp host site configuration.  Two rigs in a large, flat-bottom 'U' shape driveway.  This photo is last year.  This year we are parked where the white RV is and our co-hosts are parked where we are in this image.

 One of the things you learn in a short time of driving one of these truck/trailer combinations is that, unless it is a perfectly straight drive in, it is impossible to back out of somewhere on the exact same path that you drove in on.  A near 90 degree turn in the driveway and giant ponderosa pine trees lining both sides of the driveway makes it impossible for all but the smallest of truck/trailers to back out of his half of the host site.  A medium to small size class A or C could probably get backed out too.  But that is not what we have and Gary is looking at doing what we did last year, which is to drive straight out through campsite number 45. 

This was us last year, looking through campsite number 45.  We are hitched up and about to pull out through number 45, weaving our way between power pedestals, water spigots and fire rings.  Gary will have the extra challenge of slipping by the end of our rig.  I offered to hitch up and pull out of the way but he waved me off.

The big difference is that when we did it last year the government had shut down and the campground was empty.  For Gary we are going to have to time his departure to be between the departure of the people camping in site number 45 and the arrival of the next campers.  At worst he will have a one hour window between 11:00am check-out time and 12:00pm check-in.  But with the North Rim being a long way from anywhere and the relatively slow progress one makes moving a large rig, it is preferred to start your drive much earlier than the middle of the day.  We'll see how it goes.

But in the mean time we have a couple of weeks before they go and we are going to take advantage of the last few days off we will have in our tenure at the North Rim.  Last year we only superficially visited the South Rim, this year we want to spend more time and get a more thorough look at all the South Rim has to offer.  We are going to get a hotel room in Williams, AZ and make the one hour drive to and from the park each day.  We'll use the shuttle bus system inside the park to get to all the overlooks and vista points we want to see.

But even before that, we have another sight to see.  Near Tuba City, about half-way between the North Rim and Flagstaff, AZ are a pretty interesting bunch of animal tracks; really old tracks.  As in millions of years old.  There are hundreds of them fossilized in the sandstone that has been dated at between 200 to 202 million years old, the early Jurassic period.  They are on Navajo land and tended to by small group of residents that live in a nearby bunch of homesteads.  Like virtually every other wide spot in the road, there are booths set up selling jewelry, art, crafts and weavings by local artists.  But these people are also the guides to and through the dinosaur tracks.

To call this place wide open is an understatement.

But even out here commerce springs up.

We chose our guide, Isabella was her name and she was shy only a few years of being as old as the fossils.  She had a narrative that she recited as we went along but asking questions was not really an option because her English skills did not extend beyond her memorized narrative and my Navajo  was even less.

Isabella on the right.  No clue who that is on the left.

Regardless, the fossil tracks were a sight to see.  The hours of driving and the couple dozen gallons of diesel to get here was worth it.

To make the tracks easy to see they are filled with water.  In addition to the ones that are wet, there are a slew of dry ones crisscrossing all over the place.

To give it a little scale, Cyndee put a foot alongside one of the tracks.  These were either Coelophysis kayentakatae or Dilophosaurus, both, indeed all tracks at this site, were made by carnivores.

This track was so well preserved that the claws are clearly visible.

Some of the prints must have been made on a rainy day as they are sunk deep and have a "squishy" appearance.

Not all the tracks are quite so easy to see, or as small.  Here the guides have outlined a faint print with rocks to help those of us with an untrained eye to see better.



And again, Cyndee steps in to give a little scale to the subject.  This critter was huge.

Despite our guide's decades of leading tourists through the track beds it did little for accuracy of the narrative.  We were told that the large track in the photo above was that of a T. rex, but there is no way it can be.  The rock, and the tracks in them pre-date the age of T. rex.  T. rex was an inhabitant of the late Cretaceous period, the period that saw the end of all dinosaurs. Our tracks today were formed during the Jurassic period, (arguably the golden age of dinosaurs) more than 130 million years before T. rex existed.

Our guide was also quick to point out dinosaur eggs and dinosaur poop.  Dinosaur eggs are a high order of rare, dino poop, not so much.  But in our case today, neither of these fossils are.  Instead, both apparent fossils are what is known as iron concretions.

Dinosaur egg - not.

If this were real dino poop (properly known as coprolite), one could surmise that this beast was having a bad day.

Regardless of the inaccurate narrative of our guide we were impressed with the tracks.  They were the real deal and we physically touched the footprint that a creature left behind 200 million years ago.

To put a little more context to what we saw I did a little wiki'ing and came up with some artist's renderings of what our dinos probably looked like based on skeletal and skin fossils found all over western North America.

These guys stood about six feet tall and were around 18 feet long, nose to tail tip.  They were fast, agile and may have been lone hunters.  But the collection of tracks here on Colorado Plateau would suggest that they at least frequented a common place.

If you get to the Arizona Strip make the extra effort to find this paleontology gem.