Customer Reviews

Dinosaur: Four Seasons on the Green and Yampa Rivers (Desert Places)

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This book shows off the backcountry of Dinosaur National Monument through the four seasons. Dinosaur is in a remote location on the Utah-Colorado border. Though created to protect a great dinosaur quarry, its most important resources are 200,000 acres of backcountry and one of the country's two remaining undammed rivers, the Yampa.

Crimmel and Gaffney begin the book with a winter camping trip, with temperatures below freezing but not yet really cold. After this, they raft down the Yampa and Green rivers during the spring high water and through the lower water of summer, returning to the park in autumn. The photographs by Steve Gaffney nicely convey the beauty of this landscape in all four seasons.

Along the way, they see wildlife, hike up canyons, see petroglyphs, and tell the stories of this land. Their visits are often characterized by a quest for solitude in the wilderness, though they conduct this search overwhelmingly from rafts. Most visitors in the backcountry use rafts, too, and the focus is understandable. Still, this focus meant that they run into other groups, and that they meet a lot of rangers who are eager to check their permits - - not exactly the solitary experience they say they wanted. It would also have been interesting to see more of the landscape away from the rivers and canyons, where there are few trails and a higher expectation of solitude.

If you've never been to Dinosaur, this short book will help convey the beauty of the land and its rivers, and make you thankful that environmentalists blocked two proposed dams in the 1950s. If you've only been there in one season, this book will make you want to check it out in different times of the year.