Let’s go hiking with dinosaurs!

This week we’re hiking near Moab Utah and we’ve been avoiding the big National Parks (thus far). We’re boon docking in a very dusty BLM spot outside Arches National Park and having a great time! The crowds are thin, the day time heat is intense, but the sights are spectacular!

Where to Stay for Hiking with Dinosaurs

Based on its proximity to Arches, we settled our boondocking sites on Copper Ridge Dinosaur Trackways. It’s off US Highway 191 and BLM Road 143. And it’s a great spot for camping and for hiking.

BLM Road 143 is about 20 miles north of Arches, 25 miles north of Moab and about 33 miles from Canyonlands National Park. It has room for a lot of campers and RVs down its dusty gravel road. There are many established camping areas here and any size car or RV can easily travel this mostly smooth drive. At the end of the two mile road is a parking area and trailhead for hiking and mountain biking. This small lot filled up most days during our visit, but got quiet again at night.

We enjoyed quiet evenings and great sunsets here. What we didn’t enjoy quite as much was the wind storms. They’d come up out of no where and instantly cover everything inside the camper with a fine red dust. It’d happen before we could get the windows closed! The wind did keep the heat down, so that’s the upside.

Join us as we hunt for the not so elusive, but downright amazing, dinosaur tracks!

Copper Ridge Dinosaur Tracks Interpretive Site

Moab, Utah has tons of great restaurants and tourist spots. We loved exploring there and hope you’ll check it out too. But there’s something to be said about being in the wild desert.

The winds blew like crazy. Our truck camper got covered in red dust. But we enjoyed the best sunsets. And we got to hike around dinosaur tracks. I’ve read about dinosaurs, who hasn’t? But seeing their footprints preserved in the ground was next level amazing.

Go early, before the sun is too scorching. There’s a short hike that’s right near a parking area and pit toilet. You’ll see some tracks and feel amazed. But there’s another loop that took us a couple hours. And we saw so many preserved prehistoric animal prints.

We literally placed our feet right into the tracks of a dinosaur from the Jurassic period, approximately 150 million years ago. They can even tell from some of the track positions that the sauropod was in the midst of a right hand turn. I’m not sure that my eyes could discern that or the ripples left behind by the prehistoric river. But being in a place that captured living history was extraordinary.