Rock Springs, WY to Steamboat Springs, CO

We cut clean across Utah today, following another almost entirely deserted road. There were distractions though: some very steep hills, the Flaming Gorge Dam and some useful little signs that explained what sort of rock we were driving through and what fossils we might find if we happened to have packed our trowel. The fossils are a big deal around these parts, as we discovered at the Dinosaur National Monument.

The National Park Service is one of the greatest things about America. The land and animal and plant life they look after is pretty special, but the way these things are protected and managed is simply brilliant. We experienced this again today as the boys earned another pair of Junior Ranger badges, this time by learning about the amazing natural history which happens to momentarily be part of the USA. Ranger Bryan took us on a guided hike through a valley of fossils, explaining from first principles how it had all come to be here. In the stones we saw the marks left by the waves of an extinct sea some 150 million years ago. We saw unexcavated femurs rising from the cliff face, somehow more convincing evidence of the original creature than a full reconstruction might be in a museum. Finally, we were shown petroglyphs made, at some point during the last thousand years, by the people who lived here before the Europeans arrived. Then Ranger Bryan pointed up to a mountain on the horizon where there was a shadow: a small forest of Douglas firs. "That's what we call a remnant forest; the original forest has receded until that's all that's left, but at one point it would have covered this whole area."

Now those people are gone, the forests are gone. Most disturbingly, the lush grassland that greeted the Euro-American settlers only a century or so ago is gone, replaced by the arid scrub we have seen so often. But eventually, of course, all things go the way of the dinosaur.

Today's best name has got to be Dinosaur, CO, where we stopped for coffee. It's another itty-bitty place, and it used to be called Artesia before they changed it to try and drum up some interest from the passing paleophiles. It's either cute or desperate, but the street names were changed too and the main drag is called Brontosaurus Boulevard.

Licence Plate news - we only need Hawaii. We've seen everything else (even a Washington DC plate, and there was much excitement when Delaware and Rhode Island turned up) but sadly no sign of anyone from the Aloha State. Still, there's no shame in getting 49 plus DC when the one you're missing is Hawaii. It just makes it all the more bizarre how often we've seen it in the past. Two more days to go though so who knows...