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Tag: riggs hill

Colorado National Monument: Bench Trail Arch

Thursday, April 9, 2020

This evening I went for a short hike into the Colorado National Monument so I could finally get a closer look at Bench Trail Arch. While I’ve hiked below this arch on the Bench Trail a number of times before, it’s always been in the middle of a longer hike through the Monument, so I’ve skipped climbing up to it to save my energy. After work I drove over to the Wildwood Trailhead and arrived just as the temperature out dropped by about ten degrees and it started to rain and get windy. I guess a good thing about the bad weather was that there were only a few other vehicles in the parking lot, which can sometimes be a busy location. I checked the radar on my weather app and saw that this storm system was going to pass through pretty quickly, so I started hiking anyway. It was a little chilly and I got soaked at first, but once the rain and wind stopped, I dried off pretty quickly and warmed up again. Of course, all the rain made it pretty humid out for the rest of the hike, which was not very comfortable.

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Riggs Hill

Friday, June 6, 2008

After work today, Amanda and I headed out for a short hike, since it has been a whole week since we last did any hiking. Went over to Riggs Hill, which is only a few miles from our house. This hill was named after Elmer Riggs from the Chicago Field Museum and was the site of the very first dinosaur excavation in Western Colorado. Here he found the first fossils of the Brachiosaurus in 1900. There is now a cast of some bones along the trail where this discovery was made.

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