Camping With Deer In the Aspen Groves Of Utah

We've started our road trip home from Grand Junction, Colorado and our first stop is Dinosaur National Monument in northeastern Utah. If you've missed our previous two videos be sure to go back and watch those to follow our trip down to Colorado and see all the upgrades we made to our trailer at the Timberleaf headquarters. Dinosaur National Monument straddles the border of Utah and Colorado and includes one of earth's richest known dinosaur fossil beds. The quarry visitor center is open year-round and is the main visitor center. From there a tram will take you to the quarry exhibit hall which is a cliff face filled with over 1,500 dinosaur fossils from the Jurassic period 150 million years ago. Right now we are making our way into the quarry exhibit hall to see a ton of dinosaur fossils. This is going to be amazing. We've actually hiked up to this before but it was closed. Yeah we were here in 2020 and so the exhibit hall was closed and we just kind of hiked around on our own so this will be new territory we're really excited. Oh man here we go. During a drought many dinosaurs died near a river's edge and when the rains returned floodwaters carried away the jumbled bones of over 500 dinosaurs. Erosion eventually exposed these fossils and in 1909 they were discovered by Earl Douglas of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum. Oh wow that's a skull up there that is crazy. That's so cool this is so cool. So they discovered dinosaur bones here in 1909 and paleontologists have found over 400 different types of dinosaurs here and there are 1,500 fossils behind me. Crazy. 15% of the bones on the quarry face are those of Stegosaurus and across the top section are the scattered remains of an almost complete dinosaur. Oh it gets better. It's a femur. Adult right thigh bone Morrison formation 150 million years ago. You compare that one with that one it's the same it's the same dinosaur. It's just a young one? Young Camarasaurus. The difference in the size of that bone though is crazy. That thing must be yeah. One of the outstanding features of the quarry is the large number of skulls that have been found. Of the 14 complete skulls that were discovered on this site two Camarasaurus skulls have been left on the quarry face and the original skull of an Allosaurus is on display in the exhibits. That's so cool. The fossil discovery trail leading you downhill from the quarry exhibit hall back to the visitor center allows you to walk through millions of years of geologic time. It's so crazy it just feels like there's just dinosaurs buried under all of these hills just the geology is really fascinating. Well even if you aren't a huge fan of dinosaurs I know they can be jerks you got to come to the exhibit hall it is impressive there's just so many pieces in there of uh and that's they dug up full skeletons and have sent them off to museums and different universities so that's not even everything that was actually found here as well. Yeah it's crazy it's a perfect day later in the season in the summer you'll definitely want to pack some water yeah it was actually very convenient just to hop on the shuttle to come up and then we're doing the hike going down pro tip. We took the Morrison formation trail spur that follows the same sandstone layer that is exposed in the quarry exhibit hall. So it's hard to see it's it's kind of like a little game it's kind of fun trying to find the bones but there's a outline of an old bone right there I think the last time we came like six years ago they had little arrows so you actually could spot stuff a lot easier pretty cool though dinosaur bone in the wild I didn't even look that way that's pretty dinosaur national monument isn't just about the quarry over 90 percent of the park is wilderness area filled with canyons and rivers if you visit you'll find plenty of campgrounds hiking trails scenic drives petroglyphs and historic structures to keep you entertained that was really cool that was awesome I mean we've seen dinosaur bones in like the smithsonian but never just still in the side of the mountain yeah where they were discovered so and that many awesome spot gotta do it yeah if you ever find yourself in the very north east corner of utah come to dinosaur national monument yeah by the way on the way here there's a ton of blm land that you can camp in but for now off to flaming gorge all right let's go let's go well exploring our first forest road in northeastern utah ashley national forest uinta mountains i believe we're in the aspen groves this is so cool so different for us god and there is just camp spots everywhere and you know what's cool it's one o'clock we have the whole afternoon to explore if we can't find anything quickly i mean we might as well explore we got a million options yeah and eight hours until sunset so this whole area along us highway 191 in the ashley national forest is filled with forest roads and dispersed camping as well as a few campgrounds we traveled through here six years ago and couldn't wait to get back and explore some of these forest roads if you're interested in more details about where we went or any other locations we shared as well some behind the scenes content make sure to check out our patreon community geez which way do we go i don't know there's so many roads up here um here's a historical site i think there's a cabin or something out here so we're turning around and uh i'm not getting out because it is saucy okay well carry on i'm surprised we didn't get stuck right there i'm just in two wheel with the trailer the trailer was even sliding and we're going about eight miles an hour well we're strolling through lodgepole campground 8100 feet just to check it out and there's only one camper in here there's actually a lot of spots and you can get just about any size rig in here we saw full size class a with it with a towable this is nice pretty that looks old what is this gonna open up to we were intending to either stay somewhere with a view of flaming gorge reservoir or within the aspen trees spoiler we'll get some amazing views of the gorge in our next video so we have done a fair bit of exploring some different roads and we're not finding anything that's just amazing with views of flaming gorge or really views of much of anything so now that we've got the jeep and trailer completely filthy uh i think we're gonna head back to that original area that we were looking at with the aspens and all of the deer and a little bit less snow and find a fun place to call home for the night there heck yeah and i can't believe there's no wind it is a gorgeous day so we just spotted what we think are maybe elk uh they're up in the tree line so matt's trying to get his long lens out and see if we can shoot those guys yeah they ran away and a couple came back also here's the aftermath of all of our exploring yeah it's uh pretty dirty yikes i'm so excited we found our spot for the night and i get to camp in my aspens and there's so many deer there were three that just walked right by um so we're gonna definitely have visitors tonight but uh we're both pretty excited about this campsite i don't think i launched that from the last time oh we got googly's everywhere nice let's go son my god it's quiet up here it's so peaceful uh but yeah camp set up that was quick now i guess uh gather some firewood and relax because we have a lot of afternoon left start the deer counter start the deer counter and i just want to have a fire all day it's perfect out you can hear every bird take off land move across a branch there's a bunch of woodpeckers out here and camping product du jour bear spray oh our sun's back yeah some of that's okay there are two deer eating just right by our camp i can't even stand it i'm so excited this is so cool i don't think that's gonna break i think it is um okay there it is told you so did that hurt well good news is we're finding good wood bad news is this chainsaw has put in four or five years of good work i think the battery's had it chainsaw has just about had it and we'll keep it going until it won't but we just had a 300 amp hour battery put in our timberleaf trailer by timberleaf i may be able to charge this battery all the way up and we'll still have plenty of juice for us in the camper all right so this is exciting if our power bank could handle this i know our camper can we just had a full victron system installed at timberleaf by their crew they're amazing did a killer job on this kind of rebuild upgrade it's like we got a new trailer but anyway they put in a 375 watt inverter that can surge up to 750 for a few seconds i believe and this should not reach that i can't wait to see how much power this uses we're currently at 97 on the battery so inverter on and then we can uh adjust to see how many watts we're going to be pulling so it looks like the inverter just on own probably pulls about seven or eight watts so that's why they install this button so when you're not using it you don't have that little bit of parasitic bleed from that being on so uh here we go we're at negative 11 watts beauty so this chainsaw battery charger is charging at 100 watts like on the nose i can't wait to see how this does let it go for about an hour i'm gonna well 100 watts i mean that's nothing we're gonna have plenty of juice we have our solar panel too we could plug that in gosh so many things hook it up so this is our new shelving storage unit in the pica we are so excited if you remember before we just had that netting and uh we jam packed a lot of stuff in there so i think just having some different compartments will be a lot better so we'll show you what this looks like at the end of the night when we get in to go to bed and put all our stuff away and 10 points if you've already spotted matt's p funnel another new upgrade from timberleaf is this utensil holder i just threw everything in there but that's amazing you need at least like 14 more i know getting a little rolly we're gonna have to go tp over log cabin here like caveman did it why are your pants like that uh it just feels good the breeze feels good you look real special well he's still chopping wood folks i don't know do you guys think we have enough wood for tonight jeez we're getting there i think we'll be good after these few i mean that's splitting really good yeah it's weird because it seems like it should be wet or rotten or something but it's great it's just another kind of wood yeah we just spotted deer right out there so our friends todd and janelle mentioned if you find a dead aspen they're actually really easy to push over so i have to try oh that's connected well that one's just rotten might still be good we don't need any more wood though oh geez oh it's a real thing i gotta at least take some of it oh we gotta get through it okay we'll stick with three yeah i like well one more thing timberleaf added for us which we're really excited about is the five pound tank on the outside right where we hook up our heater this is going to be so much more convenient than pulling out our 20 pound tank setting it on the fender using up all emily's shoe space i guess you could say but this is just so convenient and it's not going to be terrible tonight i think the low is 30 so we won't even use a pound of propane i doubt we'll even use half a pound so this five pounder will probably last us quite a while with the heater unless it's around zero fahrenheit yeah this is just one of those extra add-ons you can get that we probably should have done years ago it just makes sense because we are definitely four season campers we love going out in the winter and that'll be handy when we're just cooking too because we can just put the stove right into the galley and hook it up to our fire maple yeah we actually have a an adapter hose that goes from a five or 20 pound tank down to the one pound tank connection or any stove that's pretty amazing all right we're good to go for later everything's sealed so i can go ahead and open this up so i don't have to later and what's ready for bed we'll do a preheat of course okay we are in bed here is everything in our new cubbies we love it there's matt's toes uh got the heater going we have it set at 552 but it's 61 in here oh it's plenty warm and uh yeah we're loving the new cubbies leave it nice for the next guest somebody's gonna be really happy yeah yeah good job babe well a lot of you ask how do we drop our grumpies in the woods that's it beautiful state-of-the-art high quality shitter and the birds are chirping look at that view okay it's time we are all packed up and ready to go time to leave utah we're gonna head north through wyoming and into idaho we're not sure exactly where we're gonna be camping tonight we have a general idea we'll be boondocking somewhere probably uh but that will be in the next video so we will leave you here thank you guys so much for watching and we'll see you in the next video let's go