Bones, bikes, blood

Don't panic! Although the title of this post sounds like we experienced some kind of gory bicycle wreck, the three items are unrelated, except that they all happened this weekend. On Saturday morning we decided to take a day trip to Moab so we could hike the Mill Canyon Dinosaur Trail and look for dinosaur footprints. The drive there was strangely beautiful: it was kind of foggy and the desert we drove through, normally brown and scrubby, was smooth and sparkly, huge stretches of unmarked snow. The sage brush and bitterbrush plants were frosted; bigger trees had mounds of snow on their branches. Sections of the Colorado river were frozen and covered in snow.

As we got close to Moab, we emerged from the fog to find a sunny blue sky, though there were still a few inches of snow on the ground. First we went to a couple bike stores; it's always fun to see what's new and different in the shops. It's still too early in the season, and the shops that were open were neither fully stocked nor fully staffed, so we didn't really get to see any bikes. Then we had lunch at Eddie McStiff's and rummaged around at a used clothing store where I found a fabulous knobbly sweater for me and a couple of pairs of jeans for Cailan. Finally it had warmed up enough for a pleasant hike, so we headed north of town for a few miles.


We pulled off the highway to a dirt road that was covered with hard-packed snow and bumped along it to the trailhead. The hike is very short, but most of the trail runs along the base of a short cliff where there are lots and lots of exposed dinosaur bones embedded in the rock. The first picture is vertebrae from a sauropod, probably camarasaurus, and the second is ribs, again from a sauropod. There were also bones from allosaurus, camptosaurus and stegosaurus.




We never found the dinosaur footprints that are supposed to be at this site. I assume they were covered in snow. The snow at Mill Canyon was really wild; the top surface was a jumble of inch to inch-and-a-half long ice crystals.



Sunday was another nice day, a great day for a bike ride. Mom and Dad gave us a gift certificate to REI for our anniversary, and we used that to by a child bike seat. So far we've always pulled Cailan in a trailer, but we learned that he has more fun when he's up on the bike seat. Our new seat got here last week, but we had to order an extra rack to attach the bike seat to our road tandem. Chris got that installed Sunday morning, so in the afternoon we were able to take our first family ride on our 'triple'. The child seat sits up pretty high and is close to the stoker seat, so that Cailan's knees were almost touching my rear but my feet had lots of clearance from his foot rest. It was nice to be able to reach back and give him a pat and to hear him during the ride.

We bundled him up with tights, fleece-lined wind pants, snowboots, a long-sleeved shirt, wool sweater, coat, gloves, and a Smartwool hat under his helmet. He stayed warm throughout most of the ride, though he did say a few times that he was cold - his cheeks were very red! We rode north from town past some farms and giant houses; we saw horses, cows, alpaca (Cailan's favorite part of the ride by far), a llama, a burro, and three goats. We put in about 20 miles, which isn't really a very long ride, but it's as much as we can do with a 3-year-old and temperatures in the 40s. We'll have to find someone to take a picture of our bike with all of us on it.

The blood part of the weekend came at home, after the bike ride. I was fixing some post-ride hot chocolate for Cailan and me, which we planned to enjoy with some freshly baked peanut butter cookies. Cailan was twirling in sock feet on the hardwood floors of the kitchen, wiped out, and did a face plant. He cut his upper lip pretty bad, but he was ready for his hot chocolate before I even got all the blood wiped away.