Danger at the Dinosaur Stomping Grounds Read online

  “Scared me to death,” Toni said.

  “Yeah, I noticed.” Buck chuckled. He pulled the phone out of his pocket and looked at it. “I can’t believe we’ve got two bars up here. It’s a text from Nash.”

  Buck read the message aloud. “‘Sorry. I can’t come today. Robert had an emergency and left yesterday morning. He didn’t get back last night, and he’s not back yet today, so Ranger Ortiz is not letting me leave the park.’”

  Buck typed a message back.

  “What did you say?” Toni asked.

  “I told him no problem, that Buck and Toni will be okay by themselves.”

  “Why did you say that?” Toni said.

  “Nash thinks he’s texting Dad. If he knew he was texting me, he’d want to get ahold of Dad.”

  “Aren’t you going to text Shoop and let him and your dad know?”

  “No, we’re not babies. We’ll be okay on our own,” Buck said. “And now we’ll have more time to find that car and trailer.”

  “I guess so,” Toni agreed.

  Buck put the phone back in his pocket, and the two turned north on the blue trail. They kept going along the top of the bluff until they reached the signpost and marker pointing toward the stomping grounds. Buck jumped off his bike and hurried to the edge of the bluffs. Putting the binoculars to his eyes, he scanned the valley floor.

  “I don’t see anything. Here, you take a look.”

  Buck turned around to give Toni the binoculars, but she wasn’t behind him. She was still back by the bike trail, squatting down and looking at something on the ground.

  “What are you looking at?” Buck asked, coming back to her.

  “I don’t know.” Toni rubbed her finger across the ground, then stood up and held her hand out toward Buck. “It’s some sort of white powder.”

  Buck looked from Toni’s finger back to the ground.

  “There’s a little trail of it,” he said. “It seems to be leading down to the stomping grounds. Let’s see where it goes.”

  Leaving their bikes at the top, they followed one little bit of powder to the next until they reached the sign at the stomping grounds.

  “Oh my gosh!” Buck said, racing past the sign. “Look! There’s powder all around the track where I put my fingers yesterday!” He squatted down and touched the track. “It’s greasy inside.”

  “In an art class I took,” Toni said, kneeling down beside Buck, “we each made a handprint in clay. When the clay dried, we greased the handprints real good with petroleum jelly and then poured plaster into them. When the plaster dried, the grease made them easy to pop out and we had plaster replicas of our hands.”

  “That doesn’t explain the powder,” Buck said.

  “Yes, it does. To make plaster, you mix this powder stuff with water. It dries as hard as a rock.”

  “How long does it take to dry?”

  “Not long. Twenty or thirty minutes.”

  “We left here yesterday at about two thirty, didn’t we?” Buck said, staring at the greasy track. “Someone had plenty of time to come up here and illegally make a cast of this print.”

  “And a whole lot of other ones too,” Toni added, standing up and looking around. “Turn on the head-mounted camera. We need a video of this.”

  Buck did as Toni instructed. Then he and Toni went to each print that had powder residue around it. They counted fifteen tracks that had been vandalized before walking back to the top of the bluffs.

  “This really doesn’t make any sense,” Buck said when they reached their bikes. “They couldn’t climb up these cliffs.”

  “They must have come up the way we did,” Toni said.

  “Couldn’t have,” Buck said. “We didn’t pass anybody coming back down, and there were no cars in the parking area.”

  “Maybe they came up in the middle of the night,” Toni said.

  “They would have driven right past where we’re camping. As quiet as it is, we would have heard them coming and going.”

  “Then there must be a back way up,” Toni said.

  Buck rushed to the signpost map. “You’re right! Look!” he said. “There is a back way in!”

  Toni looked where Buck pointed. From the happy face that indicated where they stood, the blue line ran south for about ten inches. Then it turned sharply to the left and continued on another two inches all the way to the valley floor. A TH was written where the blue line stopped.

  “And you can get to it by coming down Salt Valley Road!” Toni said. “See? This must be a connecting road.”

  Starting at the small TH, Toni ran her finger along a thin black line until it met a thick black line that ran east of the bluffs from the top of the map to the bottom. The words SALT VALLEY ROAD were written along the thick black line.

  “That would be an easy way up,” Buck said. “They would just drive down Salt Valley Road, turn right onto that connecting road, and pretty soon they would be at the blue trailhead.”

  “And look at the topographic lines,” Toni added. “They’re pretty far apart near that trailhead. There aren’t any bluffs there.”

  “The map’s key says one inch equals a quarter of a mile,” Buck said.

  “So, it’s about three miles from here to that trailhead,” Toni said. “We could get there in—”

  “We’ve got all day,” Buck interrupted. “Let’s go take a look!”

  TAKE 16:

  “BIG AL’S VISION WAS LIMITED TO A TWENTY-DEGREE ANGLE, WHICH MEANS HE HAD TO KEEP HIS PREY RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIM. HE COULDN’T SEE OFF TO THE SIDES.”

  Turning their bikes around, Buck and Toni followed the blue stripes south, back across the top of the ridge. They soon reached the signpost that marked the juncture of the green trail they had ridden up earlier, but they didn’t turn. They kept riding south. However, it wasn’t long before the trail started angling in more of a southwesterly direction, leading them farther and farther away from the bluffs. After about thirty minutes, there was another signpost. They both stopped.

  “I wonder why there’s a map here,” Toni said, looking around. “I don’t see any intersecting trails.”

  Buck looked at the map. Heading east was an inch-long yellow line, much thinner and paler than all the other colored lines on the map.

  “I hadn’t noticed this,” he said, pointing to the yellow line. “That must be why this map is here. It shows a trail that goes back over to the bluffs.”

  They both looked toward the left.

  “It doesn’t look like a trail,” Toni said.

  “None of the trails look like trails around here,” Buck said. “You’re just going across rock. If it weren’t for the paint or cairns, you wouldn’t have any idea where to go.”

  “Well, I don’t see any paint or cairns in that direction,” Toni said.

  Buck got off his bike, let it drop to the ground, and walked over to where he thought the trail might be. “There’s some yellow paint, but it’s almost worn off. It must be a really old trail.”

  Toni looked back at the map. “The topographical lines are really squished together, so there’s a straight drop-off where that trail ends,” she said. “But if you turn south from there, you’ll start going downhill and the bluffs get shorter.”

  “Yeah, I noticed that,” Buck said. “It’s higher at the end of this old trail. Through the binoculars, we’d probably be able to see if there’s a car all the way down at the trailhead.”

  “It’s way too rough to ride bikes on that,” Toni said.

  “It’s a yellow line, so it’s hiking only,” Buck said. “We’ll just leave our bikes here and walk.”

  They rolled their bikes around a big boulder near the signpost and headed for some bushes twenty yards away.

  “Be careful. Don’t hit that big prickly pear cactus. It will pop your tire,” Toni said. She pushed her bike into the cluster of bushes and kicked down the kickstand. Taking off her helmet, she hung it on a handlebar. Buck leaned his bike against a bush and took off his helmet to
o.

  “Great,” said Buck, pulling the head-mounted camera from his helmet. “I forgot I was wearing this. I hate wearing it just on my head.”

  “Got you covered,” Toni said. She took off her backpack, reached in, and pulled out Buck’s cap.

  “Thanks,” Buck said. “You think of everything!”

  “Shoop’s training,” Toni said as Buck hung his helmet on his handlebar, put on the cap, and attached the head-mounted camera to it. They walked back past the boulder and across a blue stripe to where Buck found the yellow trail.

  “You can hardly see the yellow paint at all,” Toni said. “What if we get lost?”

  “We won’t get lost,” Buck said. “We just have to keep going east.”

  “Too bad you don’t have your compass anymore,” she said.

  A big smile crossed Buck’s face. He reached into a pocket of his cargo pants, pulled out the compass, and held it up. “When we found it in Nick’s midden, I put it in my pocket and forgot to give it to Robert to take to the rangers with the other stuff.” Buck held it flat, watching the needle spin. “We’ll go due east until we get to the bluffs, okay?”

  “Okay,” Toni said.

  They started following the faint yellow stripes, but soon they could no longer detect them. With no marked trail to follow, walking was tougher than they had expected. They kept their eyes to the ground, concentrating on each step as they slowly made their own route around boulders, over patches of loose rock, through scratchy branches, and past sharp cactus needles. It was impossible to keep going in a straight line due east, so Toni marked their trail with cairns so they could find their way back. When they finally reached the edge of the bluffs, a raven jumped from its perch on a tall rock. It cawed a few times as it circled above their heads, then flew out over the valley two hundred feet below.

  “They’re so nosy,” Buck said.

  “So are you,” Toni said, grinning.

  “At least I’m not a know-it-all worrywart,” Buck said as he walked toward the edge. “It would be cool to have wings, though, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but you don’t have any, so don’t get too close,” Toni warned.

  “I won’t, worrywart,” Buck said. He put his binoculars to his eyes.

  “I can easily see where the connecting road turns from Salt Valley Road, and way over there, I can see some blue stripes. The connecting road goes straight toward them. It’s just slickrock down there at the trailhead—no boulders like up here.”

  “Do you see the car and trailer?” Toni asked.

  “No,” he said. “Let’s just walk south a bit more. Maybe we’ll get a better angle if we get a little closer.”

  They started walking south, over more rock and around more boulders, gradually losing elevation. Every once in a while, Buck put the binoculars to his eyes but still saw nothing unusual. As they kept going, the raven flew past again. The bird was so close, Buck could hear the air rushing through its wings. He watched it as it angled upward and landed in a lone juniper. The tree’s short thick trunk was twisted like a unicorn’s horn, its exposed roots clinging to a crack in the rock high above Buck’s head.

  “Look at that,” Buck said, pointing uphill to his right. “There’s a grotto up there. See? It’s just below that tree where the raven landed.”

  “Yeah, I see it,” Toni said, looking up. “And that tree is awesome. It’s amazing that it’s gotten that big. There’s hardly any dirt for it to cling to.”

  They continued on, making their own path, a light breeze keeping them cool. Buck stopped suddenly, putting his finger to his mouth.

  “Shhh. Do you hear that?” he whispered. They stood perfectly still for a second.

  “Yeah,” Toni whispered back. “Voices, but I can’t tell what they are saying.”

  “Me neither,” Buck said. “They’re too far away.”

  Keeping low, they went closer to the edge of the bluff. Lying down on his belly, Buck peeked over.

  “It’s them! There’s a tan jeep and a trailer,” Buck whispered over his shoulder. “The trailer is still attached to the jeep, and its door is open.”

  “Can you see inside it?” Toni whispered.

  “No, the door is blocking my view.”

  Toni cautiously inched to Buck’s side and looked over. The cliff dropped straight down, but instead of plunging two hundred feet as it did farther north, it only went about fifty feet. At the base of the cliff was a steep slope scattered with boulders and loose rock. It angled down at least fifty more feet until the valley floor flattened out. Facing south, the jeep and trailer were parked on the flat valley parallel to the rocky slope. A few yards in front of the jeep, near the edge of the boulders, was a dense cluster of juniper trees.

  “They’re hard to see, but two tents are set up under those trees,” Buck whispered.

  “Let me have the binoculars,” Toni whispered. Buck handed them to her. “There are two people down there. They’re sitting in chairs, but I can’t see their faces. It looks like there’s a third chair too, but I can’t really tell.”

  “Let me see again,” Buck said.

  “Just a second,” Toni said. She scanned the valley floor south until she made out where Salt Valley Road joined the connecting road. Then she followed the connecting road west to the trailhead. “I can see their tracks where they drove north from the trailhead. I guess they turned around so they’d be headed back where they came from if they needed to get away fast.”

  “Not likely somebody would drive cross-country and find them,” Buck said, taking the binoculars back. “And unless you crawl to the edge like this, you’d never see them from up here, either.”

  Buck took a final look through the binoculars. Then he and Toni scooted backward until they were away from the edge of the bluff and out of sight from below.

  “I’m certain they have to be the ones who took the fossils and made casts,” Buck said quietly. “They’re the only people we’ve seen since we got here.”

  “I think you’re right,” Toni agreed. “It’s got to be them.”

  “Do you remember seeing any trailers at Canyonlands?” Buck asked.

  “No, but we need to call the rangers,” Toni said.

  Buck pulled the phone from his pocket. “Can’t,” he said. “No signal here.”

  “The ridge is probably blocking it,” Toni said. “We were higher up before. We can probably get a signal at our bikes.” She started to walk back the way they had come.

  “Wait,” Buck said. He hadn’t taken a step. “We’ve got to get down there and take some pictures of what’s in that trailer.”

  “Why? The rangers will find out when they catch them.”

  “What if they leave before the rangers can get here? If we have pictures, then they would have evidence.”

  “We can’t get down there,” Toni said. “That’s impossible.”

  “They had to get up here somehow, and I doubt they used the blue trail. It’s probably a half a mile away,” Buck said. “Come on. Let’s look around.”

  The two headed south along the top of the cliff but didn’t go far.

  “Right there,” Buck said, stopping and pointing to a crevice not much wider than a grown man’s body. Its ragged sides extended fifty feet down to the top of the boulder-filled slope. “That’s got to be where they climbed up, and that’s how we’re going to get down.”

  “We can’t go down that crack!”

  “Sure we can. Nash taught me how. And by the way, it’s called a chimney, not a crack,” Buck said.

  “And you said I was a know-it-all!” Toni said, then looked back at the chimney. “What are we going to do when we get down there? We’ll still have a long way to go from the bottom of this chimney to that trailer. They’ll hear us for sure.”

  Buck thought for a while, then smiled. “Remember Nash’s story? We’ll do the same thing.”

  “That’s just a story. You don’t think it would really work, do you?” Toni said.

  Buck grin
ned. “Legends get started somehow.”

  TAKE 17:

  “AS THE MOST COMMON LARGE PREDATOR DURING THE JURASSIC PERIOD, IT IS SPECULATED THAT BIG AL MAY HAVE HUNTED IN PACKS.”

  Using Toni’s cord and carabiners, Buck lowered her backpack to the bottom of the chimney. Then he sat at the edge of the crevice, pushed his feet against the far wall, and started down with Toni following. Buck quietly told Toni where to put her hands, elbows, toes, knees, and shoulders. When Buck reached the base, he squatted behind a big boulder. Toni was right behind him, smiling.

  “I can’t believe we did that!” she said quietly. “Can you imagine trying to get Shoop down that?”

  “No way, but that reminds me,” Buck said. He turned on the head-mounted camera. “We’ll get proof of how the cougar story works.”

  “I don’t think we should both go down there,” Toni said. “I think I should stay up in the rocks.”

  “Why? Are you afraid?”

  “No. If they catch you, I’ll be able to go get help.”

  “They’re not going to catch me, but you’re probably right. Here, you should keep this.” Buck pulled the phone out of his pocket and handed it to Toni.

  “I’ll go way over there before I roll a stone down,” Buck said. “If they look up, they’ll look in my direction. So you stay here and keep watch. When it’s safe for me to get down to the trailer, signal me.”

  “Okay, I’ll do this if they look up.” Toni set the phone down, made circles with her fingers and thumbs, and held them up to her eyes.

  “And give me a thumbs-up when nobody looks up again,” Buck said.

  “What if they decide to investigate and start coming toward you?”

  “A thumbs-down. I’ll find someplace to hide.”

  “And if they catch you, I’ll get back up to the bikes and call the rangers,” Toni stated.

  “They’re not going to catch me,” Buck said. “Stop worrying.”

  Buck made his way as quietly as he could. He darted behind one boulder to the next, avoiding patches of loose gravel and trying to stay undetected from any eyes looking up from below. He found a boulder he could hide behind and still clearly see Toni. Squatting out of sight, he cautiously peeked out.