Riding on the backs of dinooosaurs and cyclists, town averts its own extinction

By Lisa Levitt Ryckman
News Staff Writer

FRUITA -- Bones and bikes brought this town back from the brink of bankruptcy.

Mountain biker Troy Rarick, owner of Over the Edge Sports store in Fruita, takes in the view of Horse Thief Canyon and the Colorado River from Mack Ridge.

Dinosaur bones and mountain bikes, to be exact, which share the public lands around Fruita in high-desert harmony. In the past decade, new life and new money have poured into town, the result of good planning, good timing and good use of great natural resources.

"We're being discovered," City Manager John Schneiger said. "Not everybody's happy we're being discovered. But that's what's happening."

The rebirth of Fruita reflects how land use is changing in Colorado and across the West, with recreation and tourism replacing farming, ranching, mining and gas and oil drilling as the economic base for many communities. The acres around Fruita -- once considered the dregs at the bottom of the federal land barrel -- have turned into tourism gold.

"The desert used to be viewed as a big dump," said Troy Rarick, whose store, Over the Edge Sports in downtown Fruita, caters to the cycling crowd. "But things have changed.

"Those public lands are now one of the biggest resources for tourism in western Colorado and the entire state of Utah."

The signs of renewal are everywhere. Two hotels are being built, and a 75-acre state park is planned along the Colorado River. The town is trying to figure out a way to connect its riverfront with Loma's to the west and Grand Junction's to the east, and to access the Kokopelli Trail -- a back-country biking favorite -- from downtown.

The Colorado Welcome Center in Fruita greeted more than 200,000 people last year. The number of visitors to the Dinamation Dinosaur Discovery Museum increased 3 percent, and the town has raked in an average 20-percent increase in sales taxes for each of the past four years.

All of this, in part, because of hundreds of miles of single-track trails on the public lands that surround Fruita, trails considered a mountain biker's dreamscape.

Bicycling magazine last year named Fruita one of America's 10-best bike towns -- particularly satisfying because of all the years residents spent watching cyclists blast by on their way to Moab, Utah, a biking mecca an hour and a half west.

The once-sleepy Utah town has morphed into a mishmash of motels and yuppie-friendly shops that have attracted a younger group of mountain bikers who often take the desert landscape for granted.

"There's been a lesson that's been learned to some extent in Moab," Schneiger said. "It did mushroom into something, and it caused somewhat of a split in the community.

"We've seen what's happened in Moab. We're making sure through growth management and planning and working with the Bureau of Land Management, which manages the land around Fruita, to ensure that it won't happen."

Starting in 1995, in fact, the town has received a state "Smart Growth and Development" award every year.

Fruita's rebirth began in many ways with the Dinosaur Diamond, a 460-mile route through western Colorado and eastern Utah that capitalizes on the region's rich prehistory.

The paleontological pilgrimage to Colorado began at the turn of the century, when Grand Junction dentist S.M. Bradbury wrote a letter to Elmer Riggs, assistant curator of paleontology at the Field Museum in Chicago. There were so many dinosaur bones in the Grand Valley that ranchers hauled them home as curios, Bradbury wrote.

Riggs showed up in the late spring of 1900. In the next year he discovered the remains of the giant plant-eaters camarasaurus, apatosaurus and brachiosaurus, which he declared a "jim-dandy."

Most of the dinosaur fossils found on the Western Slope came from a 147-million-year-old geological layer cake of sand, mud and volcanic ash deposits known as the Morrison Formation.

Dry Mesa Quarry, discovered in the 1950s by a Delta couple, Ed and Vivian Jones, in an isolated region of the Uncompahgre Plateau, has yielded what paleontologists consider the most varied group of late Jurassic period dinosaurs in North America.

People still find bones all the time.

Harley Armstrong, regional paleontologist with the Bureau of Land Management in Grand Junction, often hears about them. When he was resident paleontologist at the Museum of Western Colorado there, people reported as many as 18 finds a week.

"It was more than I could check up on," he said. "One week's finds could keep us busy for a year."

Last summer, the state gave Colorado 139 a scenic and historic designation -- prehistoric, actually -- which helped Mesa, Garfield and Rio Blanco counties snag $4.75 million in federal funds to shore up the highway through Douglas Pass.

In Utah, the same kind of landscape couldn't win a scenic designation from state legislators, a possible reflection of local antipathy toward the federal government, particularly the BLM.

"I don't know what their standards are," Schneiger said. "That's all in the eye of the beholder."

The Black Ridge Canyons near Dinosaur National Monument show the power of wind and water to sculpt the landscape. Aerial view courtesy of LightHawk

Behold the land encompassed by the Dinosaur Diamond: moonscapes of high desert. Pleated foothills of sandstone and shale. Rock striated with red and yellow. Rolling desert thick with sage and piñon. This is the land of the stegosaurus, the allosaurus and all the other late Jurrassic giants that any school kid can name.

"It's only been in the last 10 years that dinosaurs have become popular," Fruita Mayor Lyle Baldwin said. "If Hollywood's going to make some money on dinosaurs, no reason why we shouldn't ride their coattails."

The tour begins in Delta at the Delta County Museum, which features 200 fossilized dino bones, heads up through Grand Junction, stopping at Dinosaur Valley at a simulated quarry and a working paleontology lab, and then at Fruita.

The Dinamation Dinosaur Discovery Museum just off I-70 in Fruita draws 70,000 visitors a year to its robotic dino exhibit, which is realistic enough to scare little kids.

The Diamond moves up Colorado 139 to Rangely -- the museum there has a hadrosaur footprint -- and to Dinosaur. There, Highway 40, also known as Brontosaurus Boulevard, leads to the entrance of Dinosaur National Monument -- a place that almost disappeared under water.

In the 1950s, as the Sierra Club's first executive director, David Brower fought to save the monument by opposing a dam at the confluence of the Green and Yampa rivers. It would have flooded the 210,000-acre monument to create water storage.

Dinosaur was saved, but in return, the Sierra Club agreed to construction of a dam at Glen Canyon, which Brower had never seen.

He has spent the past 40 years regretting that decision, which turned Glen Canyon into Lake Powell. But his feelings are not shared by the thousands of people who raft down the Yampa and houseboat on Powell every year.

Recreation has become a mainstay of Fruita and other small Western Slope towns, a fact that some old-timers clearly resented as recently as four years ago, Rarick said. "It's hard for a rural community, one that's agriculturally based, to accept tourism."

But now even the lady next door to Rarick -- she's lived in Fruita for 40 years -- has become a believer. The street in front of her house recently got repaved, with a new sidewalk, new curbs and new utilities.

"People are realizing a healthy town is good for all," Rarick said. "If it takes some bike riders and dino diggers to do that, more power to them."

March 26, 1999

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