Dinosaur Ridge

This morning A took me to see Dinosaur Ridge, at one of the hogback outcrops west of Denver.

Allosaurus terrorising local traffic

It was a great place to see the geology in action – I could imagine how the Denver region was once at the bottom of a sea, and how over the years sedimentary layers built up to a depth of two miles thick (!!!!!), and then the whole continent rose until it was a mile above sea level, and then 70 million years ago the Rockies began to grow, buckling and pushing the two-mile-deep layers up to the surface. There was even an older version of the Rockies, 280 million years ago, which were eroded down to nothing before the present Rockies even appeared.

 

The scale of time and space involved makes my brain hurt. I’m used to dealing with centuries, or at best millenia. I can’t deal with this crap.

The hogback on the right has been pushed up at an angle, the plain on the left is a two-mile deep layer of sediment

What’s special about this outcrop is that it preserves amazing dinosaur fossils and footprints in ancient shores and stream beds. Obviously the layers were once horizontal, but they’ve been pushed up at an angle, so you can get a really clear view of the whole surface.

An ancient stream bed

Iguanadon footprints

Fossiled burrows of little river worm things

Even the ripples on the river bed have been fossilised!

Ancient sedimentary layers

The white layer is formed of crystals from volcanic ash over 100 million years ago

I think this is a dinosaur bone

It was a pleasant, sunny walk up the Dinosaur Trail, stopping at fossil displays while cyclists whizzed past. Back down to the friendly visitor centre, I got chatting with one of the gift shop attendants.

SHIT A DINOSAUR oh no wait it's only a model

She asked if I knew anything about geology, so I said I was an archaeologist by training. She got excited and called over one of her colleagues, who had just been on a two-month archaeological dig in Africa, so we had a chat about archaeology. I was also telling the lady how much I loved the Denver climate (dry heat! mountain trails! no stupid oceans and beaches!). She asked if I would like to live here. I said yes, but then added glumly that there wasn’t much call for medieval historians in Colorado.

Really, who would not want to live here?

Guess I should have been a paleontologist instead.

Encounter at the Ken-Caryl Manor House

Wow, it's been a while since I updated this blog. My life has been boring.

The other day T got home from work and suggested that we all go to check out a fancy early twentieth-century manor house outside Denver which is called, imaginatively, the Manor House. So we all hopped into the car and drove the 5 miles to check out the Coloradan version of a stately home.

It was actually less than 2 miles as the crow flies, but the Manor House is cut off from the outskirts of Denver by the 'hogbacks', a 30-mile curb of 600-foot ridges that form a sort of geological buffer between the plains and the Rockies.

Hogbacks west of Denver, courtesy of Google Earth

Anyway, because of this totally cool rock formation (which is made more cool by being packed with dinosaur fossils), we had to drive a couple of miles south to cut between two of the hogbacks. A few minutes later we were there.

The Manor House was built in 1914 by self-made man John Schaffer, born in Baltimore in 1853, who made his fortune in the best tradition of nineteenth-century entrepreneurs, i.e. in railroads, grain shipping and newspapers. I tried to find something more about him on Google, but, amazingly, he doesn't seem to exist on the internet beyond the Manor House homepage. This is disappointing because I wanted to find a photo of him. I imagine he would feel at home with these guys though:

I think this was the cover art for their first album

After making his fortune, Schaffer bought a massive block of 3,500 acres in the strip between the hogbacks and the Rockies, and used it for a ranch that he named for his two sons, Ken and Caryl. On a prominent bluff in the centre of Ken-Caryl Ranch he built his own personal Xanadu, the Manor House.

 

Xanadu

 The Manor House

Okay, so he was no Charles Foster Kane. But it was a nice southern plantation-style mansion. The best thing about it is the flagpole, which used to have a light on the top. Schaffer chose the site so he'd had a direct line of sight between two hogbacks to downtown Denver. When he was holding a party, he'd turn on the light as a sign for his friends to come. All very Great Gatsby.

Unfortunately we didn't get the chance to see much of the mansion. After parking and walking round the front to take a couple of snaps, a chunky-looking guy approached us across the lawn.

"You folks with the wedding party?" he asked.

"No," said T.

The guy shrugged. "Private property, sorry. Gonna have to ask you to leave."

T was giving up that easily. "But aren't you open 5 to 10?"

"Monday to Wednesday," he said.

T looked at him quizzically. "But isn't it Monday today?"

He paused to think. "Except today. We're closed for the wedding." He gave us a how-can-some-people-be-so-goddam-stupid look. "We put up signs, sent out an e-mail blast yesterday."

By "signs" he meant the wooden arrows we'd seen on the drive leading up to the mansion, one of which said Wedding, the other I Do's. We were tempted to point out that maybe if he wanted people to realise that the whole property was closed for a wedding, he should put out signs that actually said that. None of us was sure what he meant by "e-mail blast", either. To whom? Did he e-mail literally everyone on the planet?

Anyway, we clearly we're going to get inside the fabled Manor House, so we ambled back to the car and went home.

Never mind.