Utah's Mighty Five Road Trip

This article is under development and it may take a few days before I have the entire trip documented!

Planning Essentials 

On all my trips I make sure we have a solid plan on what we are going to do along with ideas for backups.   I aim to maximize the amount of time we can spend exploring when visiting destinations 1,500 miles away from home!

The boys first learned of this museum years ago when watching Dinosaur Train, I promised that we would visit some day and this was an opportunity to deliver on that promise.  The advantage of visiting the Natural History Museum of Utah was we were able to get a bit more history on the dinosaur bones we viewed the day before along with exhibits pertaining to Utah's geology.   Helpful information with all the parks, monuments, and landscapes we would be viewing over the next few days.

Another quick stop where we only visited the visitor center and the Quarry Exhibit Hall.  This exhibit is a building that is built around a cliff that has over 1,500 dinosaur fossils!   It gives visitors an opportunity to see dinosaur fossils, in the cliff, as they are normally found by scientists!   This hall is just a small part of the park as the entire park encompasses 210,844 acres!   We all hope to visit the monument again someday to see more of what it has to offer.    It served as a nice place to stop at before we checked into our hotel.

Devils Tower National Monument is situated just west of Rapid City/Mount Rushmore in Wyoming, visit the NPS page for full details on this unique structure.   It was formed by magma being pushed up into sedimentary rock, which cooled, and formed hard igneous rock.   Overtime the surrounding sedimentary rock eroded away leaving this tower!