Dinosaur Ridge is a public attraction with tracks of dinosaurs that were discovered while road crews were building the original road to Red Rocks in 1937.  The dinosaur prints were wide open until 1989 when they were fenced in to prevent theft or vandalism.

We stumbled across Dinosaur Ridge in some tourism literature and thought that it was interesting enough to spend an afternoon at while we’re in the area.  After having lunch with Peter this afternoon, we had a couple hours to kill before heading north of Boulder to the hotel where we’re staying the next two nights, so it’s the perfect opportunity to see some dino tracks!

The tracks are really cool to see, the team that maintains the site periodically uses charcoal to mark the tracks to make them easier for visitors to see, and it really makes them easy to photograph too.  There are also various fossilized dinosaur bones that were left embedded in the rock rather than excavated, again, very cool to see and impossible to know that they are bones if the experts hadn’t marked them.

The path used to be open to vehicle traffic, and there were some very negative reviews due to the proximity of the vehicles and pedestrians on the edge of the road.  The entire road has since been closed to vehicular traffic, and now you just have to watch out for bicyclists.  The Welcome Center tells you to plan for 2 hours to complete the 2-mile round trip, but even with stops and clicking the shutter we found it be only a little over an hour.  Your mileage may vary though, based on your fitness level.

There is also a shuttle bus that runs daily until 4pm for those without the inclination of tackling the hike.  We arrived after 4 though, so we didn’t see if the shuttle was packed with tourists and screaming children or not.