The Wild World of Buck Bray: Danger at the Dinosaur Stomping Grounds
Take 1 If you walked the entire length of an Allosaurus you’d go about twenty-six feet and if you stood on top of its back you’d be ten feet above the ground Saturday October 12 The last thing Buck saw as he started slipping was the silhouette of someone’s head looking over the curved edge of red slickrock twenty feet above him Buck the stranger shouted from above Get off your knees Just use your toes and fingers Hearing someone call out his name grabbed Buck’s attention He instinctively followed the stranger’s instructions instructions shifting so only his feet and fingers clung to the steep curved rock his back arched above it Instantly he stopped sliding but he was still panicking Above him
bright blue sky Behind him air Thirty feet below him the scruffy canyon floor And in front of him the steep rounded face of red rock he was clinging to toes crammed into a crevice fingers holding onto the edge of a crack He had twenty more feet to go before he reached the top and although he was no longer sliding backward Buck was frozen Frozen with fear Twenty minutes earlier Buck and Toni had wandered from the campground in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park following a sandy trail through twisted piñon pines dwarfed junipers and a variety of scruffy bushes sagebrush and cacti The path ran beside an arroyo that wound through the middle of the narrow canyon Just a trickle of water flowed over the creek’s sandy bed Ripples in dry sandbars lining the arroyo showed that water sometimes raced through the canyon There were several boot prints going in both directions Buck’s and Toni’s boot prints had joined the others heading away from the campground
Long barren ridges of deep red rock alternating with stripes of light grayish-tan rock formed walls a hundred feet tall on either side of the canyon floor On top giant rock spires needles and pinnacles stabbed at the sky Some looked like the slightest breeze would be all it would take to topple them to the ground Others looked like armless human shapes with rounded rock heads balancing on wide shoulders of rock bodies They silently towered over the canyon like stone gods guarding ancient secrets As Buck and Toni continued the trail angled away from the arroyo and became steeper winding through a maze of huge freestanding rock formations Look at that rock It looks like a gigantic mushroom Toni had said And those two round ones balanced on top of each other look like double scoops of ice cream That one looks like the curved back of a huge dinosaur Maybe a Brachiosaurus that’s lying down sleeping Buck had said He took a camera from the pocket of his cargo pants and snapped a shot of the massive curved rock Over there are three enormous hamburger buns all
stacked on top of one another Toni said but it’s really all one rock It’s amazing how it eroded away like that See that one with the pointy fins sticking up Buck said It looks like a Stegosaurus and there’s a Triceratops head Those three rock spires are its horns They all look like some kind of dinosaur to you Toni said as Buck took pictures of the rocks Buck shrugged Dinosaurs are cool he said And these rocks are so big you can’t help but think they look like them At least I don’t think they all look like food I guess I’m hungry Toni said as they continued on They hadn’t planned to go far but Buck and Toni seemed to be mysteriously drawn deeper and deeper into the narrowing canyon as its walls closed in on either side of them It was almost as if something compelled them to keep going The canyon had narrowed to about thirty feet wide when Buck noticed a dark crevice ahead to their right The trail seemed to lead straight to it but as he got closer the trail veered to the left going behind a huge rock shaped like a beehive three times as tall as Buck
