This past weekend we took a day trip to Dinosaur Valley State Park down in Glen Rose, which is about 45 minutes south of Fort Worth, Texas. We’ve driven past the park numerous times heading south, and we’ve seen billboards for the park and the dinosaur museum that’s just outside the entrance. Mark didn’t really seem to know too much about it, and originally he’d suggested visiting Possum Kingdom Lake, but we decided to do this one first. We’ll visit Possum Kingdom another weekend this fall, I’d expect.

I’d never been to Dinosaur Valley, but I’d been intrigued by those road signs since I was a little kid, so we planned about a week in advance to head down to the park. Google maps says the drive is about 90 minutes, but it ended up taking us around two hours to get to the park with traffic. We got up at 6am and headed towards Fort Worth a little later than we’d intended, finally making it out of the house around 7:30. We packed gear for some day hiking, swimsuits, towels, lunch, and little Ripley into the car, along with two books. We were about to finish Graceling, and in keeping with the young adult theme, we packed Sabriel to start when we finished the first.

Our local Taco Cabana closed several months ago due to construction along the I-35 corridor (in fact, they’ve even torn in out), and ever since, Mark and I have been suffering terrible breakfast-taco cravings. Since our suffering has been so acute, we were willing to drive all the way to the south side of Fort Worth for our breakfast this morning, where there’s a Taco Cabana right there on the highway. Breakfast was delicious, but I’m not sure it lessened the cravings. Once our own Taco Cabana is rebuilt later this year, I have a feeling we’ll be visiting often for a few weeks until we no longer feel deprived of our delicious salsa-delivery system.

After breakfast, we weren’t far from our destination. We made it into the park around 9:30, and the weather couldn’t have been nicer. The high for the day was about 86, the sun was out, and there was a delicious little breeze blowing through the trees. About 30 kids made it into the park just ahead of us, as well as a motorcycle gang (okay, more like a troop of middle-aged motorcycle nerds wearing matching vests). The parking was a little crowded, but we made due. The entrance fee was $14 for the two of us, and Ripley was free. In fact, Ripley was allowed pretty much everywhere in the park except inside the buildings, which is fantastic. All she needed was her leash. It’s not like she can be trusted without it anyway.

At the park entrance, you can take a picture with two giant man-made dinosaur statues. There were children everywhere, so Ripley was pretty popular, and Mark took some pictures for the motorcycle nerds, so everyone could be in the shot. Everyone trusts us with their cameras. If Mark and I were thieves, we’d probably have 50 cameras by now. I guess we look wholesome, trooping around in our sneakers with our spoiled-looking little white dog. Or maybe it is the fact that we are also toting an expensive-looking camera. It’s impossible to say. I can’t even say what makes us trust other random strangers with our camera in national parks and the like.

In any event, we stopped at the dinosaur display, then we drove around for a minute to see what the park had to offer. It isn’t a large park, but it has quite a few little trails, including mountain biking and equestrian trails. Someday when we have trail-safe horses, we’ll have to come back. We ended up parking just next to what I would consider the main track site, which has a set of stairs down to the river from the parking lot and a small stadium-like seating area cut into the rocks. It wasn’t too busy yet, but still about a dozen people were down by the water in the area.

From the entrance, we crossed the river to look at the tracks on the far side. Mark carried Ripley across so she didn’t get dirty when we hiked out of the area. The tracks are obviously labeled, and I’ll be honest, they aren’t as impressive as I’d hoped. Don’t get me wrong, they were pretty cool, but I was expecting something big enough to take a picture of Ripley sitting in. Alas, we didn’t really see anything like that. It’s possible that we simply didn’t go to the right track site, as we didn’t visit them all.

In this area you can also see a rock shelf beneath the water that looks too cleanly-broken to be natural. It turns out that the tracks in this spot were excavated in 1938 and taken to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Mark and I actually saw them in 2013 when we visited the museum, although for whatever reason we didn’t take a picture. It’s funny to think that we’ve seen the excavation site for something we saw once in a museum. I feel like that can’t happen very often, for obvious reasons.

After we finished admiring the tracks and looking around the riverbed, we turned up a trail that promised to take us up to an overlook across the Paluxy River and the valley that surrounds it. It started off through a pasture and along a barbed wire fence. We could see someone’s deer blind in the trees off to our left, past the fencing. It certainly didn’t look promising, and we weren’t sure we’d gone the right way at first.

Before long, we started to climb, and we realized we had chosen correctly. The path was rockier and a bit narrower than we’d expected. In fact, Mark and I had worn tennis shoes instead of our hiking boots, assuming that we wouldn’t see too much rock-climbing. We were wrong, and we missed our hiking boots almost immediately. Looking back on the decision, I can’t imagine why we didn’t realize. We knew beforehand we were going to a park to see dinosaur tracks preserved in limestone. It just makes sense that the rest of the park would be filled with limestone rocks as well. Alas, hindsight is 20/20.

Still, the trail wasn’t too rough and our tennis shoes served, even if we’d have been more comfortable in our hiking boots. Ripley didn’t seem too concerned about the trail, despite the fact that she was wearing her walking harness instead of her running harness, which actually makes a big difference when going uphill. The walking harness hooks in the front instead of over her shoulders the way her running harness does. I felt bad that I brought the wrong one, and she ended up with a red mark on her chest for my mistake. Mark always tells me that it isn’t my fault, because if she didn’t pull, she wouldn’t have that problem.

It was perhaps a twenty minute walk up to the first overlook. We stopped a couple of times to water our fur baby, since she was exhausting herself with her excitement over the little lizards living in the weeds. We didn’t see too many other people on the trail, and the quiet was nice. From our vantage point, we could see out over a big portion of the river. The trail turned up and back in the direction we had come at this point, and it became a bit steeper for the final journey to the real overlook.

It didn’t take us too much longer to make it to the top, and the view was great. A plaque dedicated to the park’s founder marked the location, and we stared at it for a few minutes before we took some pictures out across the valley. We also took a couple of pictures of ourselves looking down at it. Mark and Ripley looked very sporty and hiker-ish staring down from the cliff into the distance, and it reminded me a bit of this picture from earlier this year, which I really like. I think I’m going to try to get one of these every time we take Ripley hiking. It makes my little family look so athletic and outdoorsy. Aren’t they adorable?

We took a break up there to water Ripley, and while we were doing so, we were visited by another dog sans leash. His people were not far behind him, and he stole some of Ripley’s water. I don’t mind sharing the water, but I always wonder a little when people let their dogs get away from them when hiking and such. What if one of us had been afraid of dogs, or some kind of animal was waiting at the top, or if Ripley were aggressive? It just seems like they should’ve kept their critter a little closer to them. Leashes are required in the park, and it seemed a little inconsiderate not to have one, but I digress. He didn’t cause us any problems, and Ripley loves other dogs, even if she is a little afraid of them, so no harm no foul.

Beyond the overlook, the trail heads off to a waterfall, which the map said was seasonal. The river was pretty dry, and the county had a burn ban, so we assumed the waterfall wasn’t running. I had overheard a park ranger say something of that nature as well, but since he wasn’t talking directly to us, its hard to be completely sure. Given the information we had, we decided not to risk heading back there. It was a long trail with little payoff if the waterfall was dry.

The other trails connected back at the area where we saw our first overlook, so we went back in that direction. When we reached that area again, we took a fork that went back off to our left from the trail we’d come down, which skirted along the river and then back up into the hills around it. The trees were huge and green, and the lizards were plentiful. By this point, we’d started to see quite a few more hikers, as we’d been out on the trail for some time.

To be honest, the trails aren’t especially well-marked. It isn’t a huge park, so it would be hard to get lost, and the major trails do have blazes. That being said, we could’ve used a few more small signs pointing us in the right direction. We figured we couldn’t walk anywhere that a half mile of backtracking couldn’t fix, so we winged it for the most part, occasionally looking at the map and hoping we were on the trails we intended. Our goal was to loop down one side of the river, cross it, and head back towards the original parking lot on the other side.

About midway down the first side, we stopped at a large rock formation and Mark hopped out onto the overhang to take some pictures. I wouldn’t come with him, since I’m scared of heights, and Ripley couldn’t go because the jump was a little too far for her. Mark passed me back the camera, and I got a neat picture of him standing out on the edge of the overhang amongst the trees. He looked so small standing so far away.

Past the scary rock overhang, we got a little confused about which trail to take, so we checked with another pair of hikers, who it turned out were coming back from the direction we needed to go. Once we turned that way, for whatever reason, the signs became plentiful. We assumed it was because the trails in this area saw quite a bit more traffic than the ones we’d taken between the overlook and this area. It turned out, according to the map, that we were now down on the other side of the looped trail that went up to the waterfall.

We crossed a dry creek bed over an interesting little wooden bridge and then another where we had to scramble up a hill behind some bicyclists. A few minutes later, we crossed the river, which was full of people. On this side of the river, the trees had been cleared a bit more, and we ended up walking through the sun for part of our trip, which wasn’t any fun. The trees had certainly made earlier parts of our hike cooler. Out in the sun, the heat was surprisingly brutal for the mid-to-upper 80s.

At one point, we passed the park’s campground, and we spotted two other brittanys tied to a tree while their human set up camp. He joked with us as we went by that he had wondered what his dog was doing way over there when he first spotted Ripley. One of the brittanys was a spectacularly handsome fellow, and the other was a little more average. From what I understand, they were both boys.

In the heat and the sun, we hustled back to the car. Our trip on this side was pretty straight since it didn’t meander along the hills or up and down the cliffs. It didn’t take long until we were back to the parking lot and in the car. We were pretty warm by this point, so we drove the car around the park for a few minutes to cool down.

Once we’d had our fill of the Xterra’s air conditioning, we parked next to the picnic area and unloaded our lunch things. It was after 1pm at this point and we were pretty hungry. We picked out a shady-looking picnic table and tied Ripley to a nearby tree. The picnic ground had a surprising number of dogs. We saw at least 10 at lunch alone. Ripley felt quite at home.

For our picnic, we’d packed things for sandwiches and baby carrots and chips. We made our sandwiches, but as soon as we did, we realized we’d sliced our bread way too large at home that morning, and they were nearly as big as my head. We ended up taking off the top part of the bread and having open-faced sandwiches. It was still too much for me, and I did’t even finish the whole thing. Ripley enjoyed her kibbles and a surplus of water, since we’d refilled her bottles at the water fountain.

We were pretty close to the swimming area at this point, so we packed away our food things and changed into swimwear under our hiking things. With our sandals in hand, we took the path that led down to the Blue Hole, which is a deep part of the river where you can jump off of the rocks into the water. When we got there, we were sweaty from the climb and excited to get into the water. Ripley was looking forward to playing in the river as well, since we’d stopped her from taking a dip a little earlier in the day.

Unfortunately, we were a little turned off by how the water looked. Despite the drying in other parts of the park, it looked like the Blue Hole was still affected by the flooding we had earlier this year. The water appeared deeper than usual, and it was murky and still. We were hot, but we weren’t hot enough to jump into a deep pool where we couldn’t see the currents. Even though we’d seen a bunch of people walking down to the water, we only saw two people get in, so it seemed like a lot of people made the same decision we did. It just wasn’t worth the risk.

Disappointed, we headed back to the car and cut our trip a little short. Without our swim, we were leaving a little earlier than we’d intended. We stopped by the park store on the way out and bought a bag of ice for the cups of tea we had waiting in the car and made our way out.

Before we left, we took a picture of the park sign. Usually we get this picture when we drive into our destination, but we didn’t really have the opportunity on this trip. Just outside Dinosaur Valley, there’s a “Creation Evidence” museum. Take that however you will.