Dinosaur National Monument Carnegie Quarry

Monday, May 25, 2009

In 2006, structural anaylsts informed monument officials that the building housing the quarry, visitor's center, and offices was structurally unsound and that allowing it to remain open would mean taking an enormous risk with people's lives. Within 48 hours, the building was vacated and closed down.

The roof is all that is holding the glass facade, the rest is detached from the building:

Spiral fractures cutting clean through cinderblock:

Slumped door frames:

The cause of this slow deterioration is a bentonitic layer beneath the foundation of the building. Bentonite is a swelling clay formed from the weathering of volcanic ash. During every rain storm, the clay swells up and pushes the rock strata above it, as it dries, it contracts. The old visitor's center here could only take so much of that pushing and pulling from beneath: forty-eight years to be exact.

It has been a source of immense frustration to tourists hoping to get inside the quarry to see the thousands of bones in high relief on the cliff face. This quarry was the reason that Dinosaur National Monument was created in the first place. Happily, the monument is receiving $13 million in stimulus funds to demolish and rebuild the Quarry building and to build a brand new, permanent visitor's center elsewhere in the monument.

Some of the treasures of the rock face:

Such immaculate preparation....wish I'd been born 50 years earlier...

See the camarasaurus skull and cervical vertebrae in this last one?

I was lucky to get a chance to go inside to see these bones this summer. The monument is expecting to reopen access to the quarry by as early as late spring, 2011.

Meanwhile, DNM 16, another quarry site in the monument has received renewed attention in the media. This is the quarry site where I cut my teeth in paleo-work in 2004. BYU was back this year to extract more bones from the same quarry, and I got to spend a few days digging, reliefing, and making plaster jackets up there. You can read about it here. Brooks' quote at the end is classic.