'A connection across time': Colorado attraction is home to world-famous dinosaur discoveries, hundreds of tracks and fossils

MORRISON • The rock is more than 100 million years old. But to Ken Carmody, it never gets old.

He’s a well-traveled man, a retired Navy submarine officer and teacher whose New York accent gallops as he shifts gears of his tour bus. He starts up the road toward that rock — that hogback between Denver and the Rockies, where Alameda Parkway bends from Colorado 470.

“There’s a lot of places in the world you never wanna go. This is not one of them,” says Carmody, also known as Cretaceous Ken. “This is a really cool place. There are things up here you will see nowhere else in the world.”

This place is Dinosaur Ridge, the longtime attraction celebrating 50 years as a National Natural Landmark. Long before that designation, the treasures encased by the Dakota and Morrison formations had achieved worldwide acclaim: hundreds of footprints and bones of prehistoric beasts, among them the first stegosaurus known to mankind.

On the heels of that National Park Service proclamation, in the 1980s, a nonprofit formed to preserve those remains and hire educators. Educators like Cretaceous Ken.

The nickname is for one time period represented by one side of the ridge, this side Carmody drives now. He’ll soon turn a corner, where the view of Red Rocks Amphitheatre emerges, and arrive to the Jurassic side.

“Basically,” Carmody says, “we go from 100 million years ago and progressively back in time until we hit a point where we’re at 150 million years ago. ... Literally, a minute later, you’re in Jurassic Park!”

It’s a staggering, startling experience: Right on the edge of Denver, right off one of its busiest highways, an up-close view of ancient time.

It was a time when Colorado as we know it was a muddy plain crisscrossed by rivers and, millions of years later, a wide-open ocean. Lifted over millions of more years, today’s ridge represents what is believed to have been a “freeway” of migrating dinosaurs, first by land and then by sea. Here, their travel is fossilized.

“There’s mommy,” Carmody says at one stop, tracking a long-neck’s huge, round imprints. “Front foot, back foot, front foot, back foot...”

He points to a smaller pair close by. “Here’s junior. One step after mommy.”

Not far from a slope of shale representing that old sea bed, Carmody points to other tracks. Some belonging to iguanodons, others to an ostrich-looking animal, others to the crocodiles of the era.

Elsewhere: an allosaurus rib bone, an apatosaurus leg, a tooth and another massive imprint in this hardened mud.

“If you ever wanted to touch a dinosaur toesie,” Carmody says, imploring tourists to the tip. “Right here.”

It’s another thing that never gets old to Jeff Lamontagne, Dinosaur Ridge’s executive director. He’s been with the nonprofit six years now.

“And still, when I put my hand, and when other people put their hand on top of the exact place where a dinosaur stood ... it’s really a remarkable feeling,” Lamontagne says. “You really feel a connection across time.”

It’s a connection that generations of people have vied to claim, for better or worse.

In March 1877, a professor from Golden named Arthur Lakes was exploring the ridge when he came by “enormous bones.” That’s what he called them in a letter to a leading paleontologist of the day, Othniel Charles Marsh. They were “apparently a vertebra and a humerus bone of some gigantic saurian,” Lakes wrote — what would later be determined as stegosaurus, among others.

Lakes followed up by shipping specimen to Marsh, who remained slow to respond. That was until he heard about Lakes’ correspondence with Edward Drinker Cope, Marsh’s rival in the field. Marsh quickly prepared a note for a national journal, which was titled “Notice of a New and Gigantic Dinosaur” and told of a creature that “surpassed in magnitude any land animal hitherto discovered.”

Thus the ridge near Morrison became an early battlefield for a period that became known as the “Bone Wars” — a period marked by Marsh’s and Cope’s bitter attempts to win fame and fortune over the other. At the ridge and elsewhere in the West, there were reports of bribery, theft, sabotage and enlisted “dinosaur rustlers.”

A PBS documentary put the ordeal in perspective: “Cope and Marsh launched America’s love affair with dinosaurs and the prehistoric past that continues to this day — but they also managed to destroy each other in the process.”

From the ruins of their reputations rose others with greedy intent. In the 1930s, Alameda Parkway construction toward Red Rocks Amphitheater exposed more tracks and bones and ushered in a new wave of interest. The road over the ridge was eventually closed in hopes of cutting back trucks with their tools for digging and carving.

Today, looting isn’t the threat that natural forces are, Lamontagne says. A recent master plan for Dinosaur Ridge’s future outlines ideas to mitigate rockfall and erosion to the tune of more than $17 million.

“We lose dinosaur tracks almost every year,” Lamontagne says. “The really longterm bad news is that gravity is going to win. The question is how long, and what steps do we take to hold it off?”

But just as gravity takes, it gives. It has a way of revealing more discoveries, such as one here in 2016 — raptor tracks, the first of their kind found in Colorado and the second in North America.

The possibilities are “unlimited,” Carmody says on the tour. Dinosaur Ridge, he notes, is but a small section of a formation running from Boulder’s foothills down to New Mexico.

“We are constantly finding stuff,” Carmody says.

During one recent tour, he stopped at a usual spot to find rock freshly crumbled and collapsed. On this ancient mud that returned to daylight, he noticed small, bulbous spots that looked to be fossilized rain drops. Other ripples and wrinkles hinted at more life from long ago.

Carmody turned to a kid on the tour: “Want to be the first human to touch this?”