Picketwire Canyonlands – dinosaur tracks!

In 2013 my whole family drove up to Trinidad Colorado for a wedding. If you’re ever passing through Trinidad, or spending the night, they have an amazing (and fancy) Italian restaurant were the waiters will sing to you. It might be called Rino’s. Give it some thought when you do drive through. Since we were driving all the way up to Colorado, I thought we should do something fun as siblings. Mother said something about dinosaur tracks and after spending some time on google, I found the Picketwire Canyonlands.

As I understood, the tracks are one of the largest sets of tracks known. The signs made it sound like it was on private property and that the owners allowed people to hike down to them. They were found when some people were out horseback riding when the creek/river was low. If the creek has been running over them this long, I wonder what they would have looked like without all the water damage.

We left Trinidad around 8 am and drove NE towards La Junta. There are several towns on the map between Trinidad and La Junta. But they aren’t really there, they’re mostly ghost towns. So, make sure your gas tank is full when you leave either of the two towns that are actually there. In 2013 there were no road signs saying “Picketwire Canyonlands turnoff” or anything like that. There may be now, I don’t know. We had printed the directions out from map quest and after driving about the right distance we started looking for signs. I expected a sign, but I had the feeling that the road number given by map quest would match up with the county road number. And that’s exactly what it was. Luckily it was on top of some kind of red octagonal sign that helped it stand out a bit.

 After we turnded off onto the dirt road, it was back roads, picket fences, cacti and jack rabbits the rest of the way. At the end of the road, the very end, there was a camps sight. That means you keep driving, you drive down the hills towards the cedar trees, over the cattle guard, and past the “private property signs”.  The tracks are on private property. The owners are kind enough to allow people onto their land to see them. At the campsite, all the camping spots were arranged in a circle and they had a circle drive to go with them. After driving the complete circle and having no other place to go, we decided that this must be were we get off. Near the bathrooms there was a plaque that gave directions to the dinosaur tracks. It was permission to hop fences. Except it was a metal bar that kept people from driving down the road instead another barb wire fence. 

We’ve been hiking before. And this IS the dessert. So we too alot of water. ALOT. And we drank it all. We also knew we’d be there during lunch time so we took 2 or 3 boxes of kashi cereal bars. According to the plaque, it was 5.4 miles to the dinosaur tracks, one way. That means that the whole trek would be 10.8 miles, and you might as well round that up to 11. But we are young, right? We were all in decent shape. And we’d be walking so no big deal. It takes no effort to walk. And in normal circumstances, it doesn’t. The hike took us 8 hrs (including all the horsing around we did). We were exhausted bye the end.

From the campsite you have to walk down a rock and shale hill. It kind of felt like it could be turned into a broad stair case, and there were some steps built in with a few old rail road ties. Then we walked the first half of the way on a sandy path. We ran across some hikers and they said that the trek was nothing (lies!). We had alot of fun getting creative with camera. Actually, we took 3 cameras and only 1 of them had enough energy to take pictures bye the time we actually got to our destination. The second half of the journey was up and down hills on a rocky path. Somewhere close to the half way point there was an old mission and a cemetery. Of course we stopped to look at the old head stones. There were some faint images on one but other than that, nothing. The mission looked like it had been a one room adobe/brick building. And there wasn’t much left to it. While we were snooping around, some interesting ppl came walking up with hiking sticks. And wearing something that looked like ponchos. In a very remote place like that, it is always wise to aproach/be aproached by strangers with caution. They said they were flute players and they were walking around the canyons looking for spots with good echos. That explained the funny looking pouches on their backs. Low and behold, they pulled out their flutes. Their group had a name and they had a recorded cd too. They turned out to be nice people.

After the cemetary, I mean the mission, we came across some pretty cool boulders. Yeah, boulders, bigger than houses! So, we stopped. Taking pictures was one of the most fun aspects of the this hike. We got some fun ones.

There are signs along the way telling you how far away the dinosaur tracks are and the original ranch house. When you see the bathrooms, you’ve reached the dinosaur tracks. Get off the main track and follow the smaller one that lead down into the river. There is a sign showing the different prints to look for. Two different sizes of Theropods (predators), Sauropods ( the one with the long neck) and Ornithopod (duck billed). One sign said there was a herd of sauropods and they were being chased/followed by the theropods. And looking at the tracks, thats what it kind of looks like. The herd was mostly all headed in one direction.

It was pretty cool to be allowed to walk around were ever we wanted. In a museum, everything is behind glass. You can barely take a picture due to the dim lights and the glare from the glass. Here you could run and jump around, no security giving you the evil eye. Take pictures and only worry about the angle of the sun. It was the most fun and “interactive” museum display I’ve ever been to. I touched a freakin dinosaur track!!!!! Stood in one! Compared my body size to them. It was AWESOME! And it was very hot. So we took our shoes off and cooled our feet in the “river”, then walked around barefoot.

As I was cooling off I couldn’t help but think that the landscape looked familiar. Then I remembered that this part of the country (maybe the county) is called Purgatory. Louis L’ amour used real places when writing his books. One of his books, The Sackets  or The Sacket Brothers, was set in Purgatory and Santa Fe. I grew up watching the movies. This place, the landscape, the color of the river water and the rocks looks like the “Purgatory” scenes in the movie.

Walking towards the dinosaur tracks was really fun. We joked around, took pictures and goofed off. Heading back was different. It was the hottest part of the day and it was summer time in the dessert. And we were getting tiered. Two of us had hurt our feet slipping on rocks. One thing to remember on this hike is: there is no one to come pick you up if you decide to throw in the towel. Saying “I’m done, I’ve had enough” isn’t an option. If you’re tiered you have to keep walking. You can take a break, but at some point you have to keep going. So we took a few breaks, and kept going. We reached the point of exhaustion, and kept going. We were obviously not as in shape as we thought we were. We finally got back to the car and drove about 45 min – an hr to La Junta (opposite direction of home but the nearest food stop). Cause we were hungry for real food, and we were out of water. When I got out of the car, I could barely walk, my muscles had kind of frozen up. We all felt alot better after eating. Then we drove about 8 hrs to get home, got there at about 1-2 am.

It was definitely a fun trip. I’d love to do it again and I often recommend it to others. I do however warn them that it’s a long hike in the semi-arid Colorado dessert. You should try it sometime. Go see some real dinosaur tracks in nature, outside of a museum!