Dinosaur National Monument

Started off with a drive to Jensen and the Utah side of Dinosaur National Monument. There's a visitor center at the base of a hill, and a shuttle tram which takes us up the hill to another visitor's center. Inside, there's a wall of bones. At some point, a river flooded and washed bodies into a pile, and this wall had a jumble of fossil bones, large and small.
After that a group of fifteen follow a ranger on a hike. There are small bits of bone, a vertebra, a fossil clam, a fish scale. Nothing terribly impressive and some of the fossils are only notable because a white arrow is painted on the stone to mark where we should look. The main point of the hike is to tell us how the strata were laid down: one layer from a river, another from an inland sea, a third from a new river, unrelated to the first and running north-south rather than the earlier east-west. There's brown sandstone, gray shale, olive sandstone, rusty red, and more. Now the strata are rotated, on edge, so that as you walk a hundred yards horizontally, you're walking across layers of time.
At the east end of the park there are petroglyphs, pictures chipped into the stone by the Fremont people, over a thousand years ago. There are lizards, humans, bighorn sheep, a couple of pinwheels and other obscure symbols. And cut into a manganese stain, there's a kokopelli with his flute; the kokopelli is in profile while all the other human figures are frontal views. What made the Flute Player different? And many of the carvings are well above ground level. I imagined the conversations that must have taken place:

"Yo, Scrawny Bear."
"Yo, Quivering Lizard, 'sup?"
"Nothing. You?"
"Nothing."
"Hey, it's Saturday night, I thought you and Sheep Girl were...?"
"Nah."
"Oh. Sorry, bro."
"It's cool."
"Got any hooch?"
"Nah. Hey, you know what would be really cool?"
"What?"
"We get some ladders, like, you know, eighteen feet tall.  And we lean them on the cliff up there."
"Yeah?"
"And then we get some, you know, pointy rocks. And we, like, spend hours and hours chipping pictures into the cliff."
"Dude!"
"I know, right?"
"That would be awesome!"