Life Keeps Walking

My wife and I were hiking up a pain in the ass desert canyon the other day, hand over hand between bus-sized boulders, no trail to follow, when she said she was done and sat in the shade. She said feel free to poke ahead and when I did, within eyesight of her I found a panel of ancient fossilized ripple marks on a boulder half the size of our house. The way the boulder landed when it fell from surrounding cliffs, what was once flat was like a painting on a wall, 90 degrees to what is currently flat. Set along the face of this late Triassic boulder at the base of Wingate Sandstone, western Colorado, was a trackway of a four-legged dinosaur the size of a hippo. I started calling back to her, and I’ve got to say it sounded like mansplaining because for good reason she didn’t want to climb the boulder choke that was required to get here and I needed to convey a scene that was unfolding: a four-legged animal had walked across a mudflat leaving four or five impressions around 210 million…