If all goes as planned, in about a year you’ll be able to walk into the new visitor center at Dinosaur National Monument and once again inspect a cliffside studded with fossils.

The old visitor center had to be demolished because it was no longer structurally sound. Earlier this year work began to take down the old facility and slowly erect a new one.

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Irony of the Week, Wyoming Edition

Much attention was raised this past week by an Associated Press story alerting Americans that Wyoming was ready to sell two square miles of prime real estate within Grand Teton National Park if the federal government didn’t make a better offer for the land.

We’ll let others debate whether Gov.

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Construction is progressing relatively smoothly on a new visitor center at Dinosaur National Monument, where the old one was torn down due to structural concerns. You can keep tabs on the new center’s progress by checking out a website run by the monument’s paleontologist.

In a recent post, Dr.

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Who says those automated phone answering systems, the ones that incessantly ask you to push this number for that information or that number for this tidbit, can’t be helpful? A new one operating at Dinosaur National Monument helps you learn relatively quickly when you might be able to land a permit to float the Green or Yampa rivers in the park.

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Summer is here and warmer weather has arrived in most parts of the country.

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There are a handful of places in the National Park System where you can view petroglyphs, which are images carved or pecked into rock, or pictographs, which are painted images. Some are walk-up panels that you can ponder for hours, others require a float down a river or a long hike.

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The showy tamarisk tree, aka “Saltcedar,” and Russian olive long have been reviled as thirsty scourges of Western national park riparian areas. But new research shows these trees are not any thirstier than some native species. However, tamarisk isn’t valued as highly as cottonwoods and willows by some bird species, the studies say.

The research, conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey, U.S.

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Work is progressing on schedule to build a new visitor center at Dinosaur National Monument. Crews currently are demolishing the old “Lower Visitor Center” to make room for the new structure.

The old Quarry Visitor Center, which featured a covered walkway past a fossil-studded hillside, was condemned due to geologic instability.

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Snowmelt’s running around the National Park System, which makes it a perfect time to start thinking about paddling trips in the parks. Here are some ideas, and contacts, that can help you get wet in the months ahead.

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Work on the badly-needed new visitor center and quarry exhibit hall at Dinosaur National Monument is getting underway, and that has prompted some changes for visitors to the park. Here’s what you need to know before you visit the area.

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