Escalante, Part 4: Dance Halls and Dinosaurs

piper01

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Oct 27, 2013
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Oct 15, 2016

part 1 here
part 2 here
part 3 here
***
For the last day of my trip, I took it easy and did a few hours of poking around before driving back to SLC for my crack o' dawn flight home. I had just planned on visiting Dance Hall Rock, but one of my friends with whom I had met up for the night suggested I also stop by the dinosaur trackway off of Left Hand Collet Rd.

The open road ahead of me, heading back to Hole in the Road.
IMG_8493_40MiRidgeRd.JPG

The "Dance Hall" itself wasn't too exciting, but I found lots of interesting details in the nearby rocks, like these small fault blocks.
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Three-dimensional filled fractures.
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Geologic contact.
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Lots of vegetation-filled potholes. IMG_8520.JPG

Cross-bedded sandstone.
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More sandstone. IMG_8530.JPG
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Lots of life in the desert, you just have to know where to look.
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So many places out there to explore. IMG_8550.JPG

Lonesome tree. IMG_8551.JPG

Twenty Mile Wash dinosaur track site. With the many spectacular moments of my trip, this part turned out to be one of my favorites. I sat down right next to a 155 million year old dinosaur footprint and ate Oreos (aka, my lunch). Oreos and dinosaurs, life doesn't get much better than that.
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Dinosaur tracks...somewhere up there.
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After looking around for 10-15 min, I finally found my first footprints. Once my eye was attuned, suddenly I saw many other tracks I had initially walked past without realizing what they were. IMG_8580.JPG

One of the best footprints.
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Walk this way!
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And my favorite tracks: see that vertical line down the middle, between the footprints? The dinosaur was dragging its tail!!!
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A little bit of fall color to cap off my trip. IMG_8648.JPG

'Til next time, Escalante. As always, it's been great.
 
That's a great little track site. Took us a while to find them when I took my family down there.
 
I used to camp right below those tracks when I first started exploring down Hole-in-the-Rock. We had no idea they were up there for quite some time!
 
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