Hi, friends!
By the time you read this, chances are good I’ll be over at my mom’s house preparing a family brunch to celebrate her birthday. We almost always have a lot to talk about, but this time I’m going to be asking her something hard: Why did you never take me to Dinosaur National Monument when I was a kid?
I’m sure there are perfectly good answers, like “I thought you would like riding the narrow gauge railroad up to Silverton to see your aunt and uncle,” or “Wasn’t it fun to go to Reptile Gardens in Rapid City?” These things are true, and I definitely did not suffer a childhood short on experiences, many centered on the always busy, easy-to-reach Rocky Mountain National Park.
But reading Parker Yamasaki’s cover story this week about the sprawling monument that straddles the Utah-Colorado line makes me want to take advantage of the agency of adulthood and make the long drive to look at the record of geologic time and soak in the rugged, beautiful scenery of an underappreciated corner of Colorado.
Senior Editor
The Cover Story
Go to Maybell. And then keep going.
I knew I was on the right track for this story when I stopped for gas and saw bumper stickers in the station that read “Where the hell is Maybell?”
Maybell was, in fact, my last stop for gas before I reached Dinosaur National Monument. The tiny town on the Yampa River is about 50 miles east of the Canyon Visitor Center, 100 miles west of Steamboat Springs, half an hour up the road from Craig. In other words, when I tried to answer where the hell Maybell might be, I could only think of Maybell in relation to other places in Colorado. Any place other than Maybell.
That signal — the town’s tongue-in-cheek self-awareness — was important to me because one of the reasons I was being sent to Dinosaur National Monument and not Colorado National Monument, not the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, not Rocky Mountain or the Great Sand Dunes or Mesa Verde, is that far fewer people visit Dinosaur than those other, equally impressive sites.
Dinosaur National Monument was pretty popular in the ’80s and ’90s, welcoming close to half a million visitors every year. But visitorship slumped in the early 2000s and hasn’t cracked 400,000 since.
Which is fine for most, if not all, of the people who actually want to visit. The campgrounds rarely fill up and there’s always room at the visitors center and on the retro Quarry tram. It’s warm in the late summer, quiet, and the lack of cities nearby make it an internationally recognized Dark Sky Park.
That Dinosaur isn’t the center point of most people’s maps is what makes the place super special.
That and, as I came to discover, its cultural and archeological significance, its logbook of Wild West outlaws and frontier people, its adventuresome rafting and backcountry camping, and the important scientific research being conducted on everything from monarch butterflies to zebra mussels. The dinosaurs were pretty cool, too.
I started the assignment wondering what I was going to find, and left it with only one major question in mind: Why the hell had no one told me to visit Dinosaur before?
READ THIS WEEK’S COLORADO SUNDAY FEATURE
Parker Yamasaki | Reporter
The Colorado Lens
Photography can be a hunt for light. Whether light is bounced from a source to expose the subjects, or moves in its brighter form, the camera is able to capture and store it into a frame to tell a story. In some cases with longer shutter speed techniques, the moving light source can be highlighted to show its path across the frame. Showing motion frozen in time. Here are the recent images by The Colorado Sun team working both sides of the Continental Divide.
Hugh Carey | Photographer
[https://coloradosun.com/2024/08/31/colorado-state-fair-photos-diving-competition-band-pueblo/][https://newspack-coloradosun.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Colo_Sun_SF_Spin_Out_ride-copy.jpg] [People watch The Spin Out carnival ride Monday at the Colorado State Fair in Pueblo. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)]
Flavor of the Week
Want to bike? Hike? Hang in the hammock? Try Mueller State Park.
Even before we climbed the quarter-mile to our walkup campsite at Mueller State Park, my 7-year-old son knew just where to hang the hammocks — and to be on the lookout for a chattery chipmunk named Lightning.
Turns out the intel came from his friend Oscar, who spilled those secrets and more after staying in the campsite neighboring ours a couple of weeks earlier, a sheer coincidence that points to the popularity of this wild refuge less than an hour’s drive from our home in Colorado Springs.
Tucked away in rugged Teller County, Mueller State Park has long served as an extended backyard for residents of the Pikes Peak region, offering a remote, backcountry escape just 15 minutes from the grocery stores and gas stations of Woodland Park, making it a forgiving spot for a child’s first camping trip or just an occasional weekend away.
Mueller is famous for changing aspens and bugling elk in the fall, and in the winter it’s a popular destination for snowshoeing and cross-country skiing, with miles of groomed trails to explore. The park’s 5,100 acres encompass dark forests, boggy creeks, tumbledown cabins and hidden canyons that provide sweeping views of Pikes Peak’s broad western flank.
The park’s well-maintained campsites come with a fire ring and adjustable cooking grate, as well as a bear-proof locker, making meal preparation easy. My wife and I shared cooking duties with a couple who joined us for the weekend — whipping up a savory turkey-and-bean chili that steamed from a Dutch oven — and enjoyed the sunset by a roaring fire.
In the morning, when the rest of our group went out for a hike, I broke off to explore some of the park’s 44 miles of trails by mountain bike, accompanied by the sounds of crows and chickadees and a coyote that briefly trotted on the trail ahead of me, before disappearing around a bend. My son and his two friends ventured from their hammocks to map out the woods around our campsite, leading to their discovery of a teepee-like fort made of downed limbs propped against a clutch of boulders.
Oscar, we were told, was going to be SO jealous.
What to know: The park offers plenty of accessible and RV-friendly campsites. For the best views, reserve one of the walkup sites, but be ready to put in work transporting your belongings. The state park has plastic wheelbarrows to use for free, but bring a collapsible wagon if you own one. Even with one wheelbarrow and one wagon, my wife and I made two trips each.
Dogs are allowed on leashes in the campground, but they are not permitted on the hiking trails at Mueller.
Reservations can be made for campsites and cabins online at cpwshop.com or by phone at 1-800-244-5613. Reserve sites up to six months in advance.
Lance Benzel | Team Editor
SunLit: Sneak Peek
An app for a senior project launches “Seven Percent of Ro Devereux”
EXCERPT: Ro Devereux has created an app for her senior high school project that predicts a person’s future — except that to nail down the perfect match of a life partner requires the app to go viral. Author Ellen O’Clover found the perfect device to propel her first novel, a YA title that explores all the angst that accompanies discovering who you are — with a measure of romance thrown into the mix. Her book was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award for Young Adult Fiction.
THE SUNLIT INTERVIEW: O’Clover was working in the marketing department of a software startup when she got the idea for her first novel — hence, the idea of a young woman creating an app that spirals out of her control. It also paved the way for her to write about identity — or, as she calls it, “the great mess of trying to figure out who you are.” Here’s a slice of her wide-ranging Q&A:
SunLit: If you could pick just one thing — a theme, lesson, emotion or realization — that readers would take from this book, what would that be?
O’Clover: I touched on this a little already, but I want readers to know that it’s all right not to know exactly what’s next. It can feel so enormous and debilitating to be young, unsure of what’s coming or how the dots on the map of your life will eventually connect. It’s OK to explore, and mess up, and try again. Trust yourself.
READ THE INTERVIEW WITH ELLEN O’CLOVER
Kevin Simpson | Writer
Sunday Reading List
A curated list of what you may have missed from The Colorado Sun this week.
🌞 The second special legislative session of the past 12 months ended as promised, with a property tax cutting compromise that — if everyone makes good on their promises — will pull two tax-limiting measures from the November ballot. Jesse Paul and Brian Eason were there to the bitter end. And we do mean bitter.
🌞 Owners of vacation rentals in Colorado kind of dodged a tax bullet that was fired during the special session, but they told Jason Blevins they’re not letting their guard down — especially after Colorado House Speaker Julie McCluskie warned them “it is highly likely” there will be short-term rental legislation in the coming lawmaking term.
🌞 In other political news, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped out of the race for president and threw his support to Donald Trump. But he still could play spoiler in Colorado — which has a long history of supporting third-party candidates — where he won’t pull his name from the ballot, Jesse Paul explains.
🌞 Lots of wolf news followed the public release of a video of gray wolf pups frolicking in an aspen grove, including news that Colorado Parks and Wildlife will trap the Copper Creek pack in an attempt to stop the animals from preying on a rancher’s livestock, Jennifer Brown reports. Jason Blevins followed up with a peek into the state’s wolf management plan, which says trapping problem wolves is ineffective, and then talked to Montana wildlife biologists who stopped doing it because translocation was often lethal to pups, and adults with bad habits didn’t quit killing livestock in their new territory.
🌞 Have you been watching the Paralympic Games in Paris? We recommend that you tune in, if for no other reason than to see Lacey Henderson, one of two in-country NBC hosts for the Games, try to help shed the cloying “tragedy to triumph” narrative that has defined coverage of these world-class athletes. “Disability has bad branding,” the former Paralympic sprinter and long-jumper and University of Denver cheerleader told Larry Borowsky.
🌞 Here’s a business story you don’t hear all the time: A private equity investor on the Western Slope turned a company over to the workers. Dylan Wiman told Tracy Ross he did it in an attempt to “correct a distribution of wealth that I think is a little out of whack.” It helped that Colorado has a program that makes converting to an employee-owned company a bit easier.
🌞 The results of state standardized tests are in and how your neighborhood school did is available in a tool created for The Sun by The Keystone Policy Center. Erica Breunlin looked for herself and zoomed in on some tiny rural school districts that are performing well despite big socio-economic challenges.
🌞 Going tubing this weekend? Researchers from the Colorado School of Mines would like you to think about your sunscreen and other things you might, uh, leave in the river or creek. Samples taken near the Molson Coors plant in Golden after Labor Day 2022 revealed a lot of nastiness, Shannon Mullane reports.
Dana Coffield | Senior Editor
Thanks for spending a bit of the long holiday weekend with us, and if you’re just catching up with us on Tuesday, here’s hoping the short work week is productive and calm. We’ll see you back here next Colorado Sunday!
— Dana & the whole staff of The Sun
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