Dinosaur Ridge

Author's Comments

I almost did not write about this one. There is something about Dinosaur Ridge that feels like a secret you stumble into rather than one you are told, and I worried that naming it would diminish it. But the truth is that most people drive past this hogback on their way to Red Rocks and never stop, which means the secret is mostly safe. What you are looking at, when you walk the road on a closed-traffic morning, is a tilted slab of the Dakota Sandstone that has been pushed up at an angle by the rising Rockies. The footprints are right there. Not behind glass. Not reconstructed. The actual impressions of actual animals that walked across a Jurassic mudflat, now turned to stone and standing nearly vertical at the side of the road. I find this almost impossible to absorb in person, and the camera does not really help. Morning is when the tracks reveal themselves. The sidelight rakes across the rock face at a low angle and the impressions deepen into something photographable. By midday they flatten and disappear, which is its own kind of magic. Bring a longer lens for the detail work and a wide one for the ridge itself, which has its own austere geometry against the foothills. The eastern view runs out toward Denver and the plains. The western view climbs into the front range. You are standing on the seam. That is what makes this place strange and quiet and worth the stop, and why I keep going back on the days when the road belongs to people on foot.

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