One of the world’s most intriguing dinosaur trackways, located in Ouray, is now part of the public domain.
This week, the U.S. Forest Service bought three mining claims in the San Juan Mountains, totaling about 27 acres, where a sauropod trackway was excavated in recent years. The agency paid $135,000 for the land, known as the West Gold Hill Dinosaur Tracksite, using money from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund.
Sauropods were herbivorous dinosaurs with long-necks like Brontosaurus, for example. Or Little For from “Land Before Time.” Pictured here is an exhibit at the American Museum Of Natural History, in New York. (Photo by Richard Messina)
According to Bruce Schumacher, USFS senior paleontologist, the track site is unique because of its size and pattern. Most known dinosaur tracks travel in relatively straight lines. This one, however, shows the long-necked dino making a more than 180-degree turn when it walked the area during the Jurassic period roughly 150 million years ago.
The West Gold Hill Dinosaur Tracksite is only the sixth recorded instance of a turning sauropod trackway in the world, and the only one turning more than 180 degrees that’s still in tact, Schumacher said.
“This trackway preserves 134 successive steps, right and left. In that sense, it is among the longest known continuous dinosaur trackways in the world,” he said. “That’s pretty cool.”
For decades, hikers have been able to see the tracks while traversing the remote Silvershield Trail, which follows an old mining route above Ouray. The trackway lies at an altitude of 9,300 feet and hikers need to climb about 1,600 feet in elevation over the course of two miles to get there.
Hikers can also take the Oak Creek Trail to Twin Peaks Trail, which is longer but slightly less steep, said Dana Gardunio of the agency’s Ouray Ranger District.
While the tracks were accessible previously, the Silvershield Trail crossed private land. That’s why the track site’s location was long kept something of a secret. The Forest Service acquisition not only enables the agency to raise awareness about it, but also ensures the site will remain open to the public for generations of dinosaur lovers to come.
“Over the years we’ve been in situations where landowners don’t really want the public on their property. So we’re always interested in some of these parcels where it gives us more guaranteed public access to use for recreation,” Gardunio said.
The sauropod tracks were first discovered in the 1950s by a Ouray local named Rick Trujillo, but at the time only a few prints were visible. Over the last decade, Trujillo and other researchers, including Schumacher, excavated the site using shovels, whisk brooms and small hand tools. The process was relatively simple, Schumacher said, because glaciers did most of the work several thousand years ago. The remaining sandstone is easily permeable.
The fact that the prints are located at such a high altitude is equally as impressive as how many impressions there are and the pattern they follow, he added.
An aerial view of the West Gold Hill Dinosaur Tracksite in Ouray. The site features 134 consecutive steps left by a sauropod 150 million years ago, making it one of the longest continuous trackways in the world. It’s also unique because the dinosaur makes a more than 180-degree turn. (Provided by Mike Boruta)
“The dinosaurs weren’t living in the Rocky Mountains at that elevation because the Rocky Mountains weren’t there,” Schumacher explained.
“It’s amazing to think that with the Rocky Mountain uplift in the later part of Mesozoic Age of dinosaurs, that dinosaur trackway layer was lifted up some 7,000 (or) 8,000 feet in elevation, and then glaciers came in few thousand years ago and scraped off all the overburden above this trackway, that somehow miraculously became preserved in sandstone to begin with,” he said. “It’s this amazing geologic story.”
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To that end, Schumacher said the tracks themselves are likely indestructible. For visitors, that means they can walk up to them, touch them and take pictures with them. Just don’t try to make a cast molding, he said, which could damage the prints and litter the remote area.
Now that the acquisition is complete, the Forest Service plans to put pictures and information about the trackway on its website. The agency doesn’t plan to do much development at the site itself, Gardunio said, but it may improve the trailhead, which is located on private land, if traffic to the area picks up.