Doors reopen at Dinosaur National Monument

From DenverPost: Doors reopen at Dinosaur National Monument

DINOSAUR NATIONAL MONUMENT — The same clay soil that yielded one of the world's premier caches of dinosaur bones can wreak havoc on surface structures — as paleontologists and visitors here discovered.

But now, five years after a precautionary closure, a new visitor center and re-engineered quarry exhibit have opened, funded by an $8.1 million dose of federal stimulus funds.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Wednesday formally opened the new 7,595-square-foot visitor center — designed to withstand the heaving of expansive soils that the owners of ill-fated homes around Colorado know too well.

Salazar then donned a hard hat and hiked to the Quarry Exhibit Hall. It reopens Tuesday with an estimated 1,500 dinosaur bones that date to the late Jurassic Period — around 148 million years ago — still embedded in the clay.

"This visitor center and Dinosaur National Monument will once again become the huge economic generator for this part of the state," Salazar said Wednesday morning at a formal ribbon-cutting attended by tribal chiefs, war veterans and residents of the Vernal, Utah, area.

The reopening marks a milestone in efforts to refurbish decaying national-park and national-monument structures nationwide. It also revives local hopes here because the buildings are a major magnet for tourists to a region of northwest Colorado that also has become a target for oil and gas exploration.

Paleontologist Earl Douglas, working for the Carnegie Museum, first unearthed dinosaur bones in the bentonite clay soils here in 1909. For scientists, the fossils — skulls and femurs and vertebrae the size of ship's anchors — are an irreplaceable motherlode because they come from nearly 15 types of prehistoric sauropods.

It wasn't until 1958 that a visitor center opened at the monument. Over the next 40 years, the bentonite heaved and buckled. Ceiling tiles began falling. Concrete floors and window glass cracked. The chief paleontologist's office floor began to tilt so much that a chair on wheels would roll, carrying him away from his desk.

During the Fourth of July weekend in 2006, engineers warned it was only a matter of time before visitors or staffers were hurt. The superintendent closed it down.

As many as 400,000 people would visit in good years. Last year, about 200,000 visited the monument, driving the roads, hiking on trails and rafting wild waters inside the 210,000-acre park preserve that surrounds the bone-digging area.

Salazar faced a few local protesters during the visit, a group that showed up at the ribbon-cutting wearing "I Love Drilling" T-shirts.

Salazar said being asked to select oil and gas development over land conservation is a "false choice," referring to work to balance energy development with conservation.

After touring the quarry, Salazar said he would have "put a different shirt on that would say: 'Drill in the right places, with the right protections.' "