Jurassic OHV Park: Hunting dinosaurs on two wheels in Montana

It turns out, there’s a place where these childhood fantasies can easily become our grownup realities. And that place is out in the expansive pastures and crumbling badlands of rural Montana.

Like it did to so many others, COVID-19 slammed the door on my riding plans this year. I was going to ship my Yamaha FZ-07 to Morocco. I was going to tour Europe and follow the MotoGP series. I was going to ride across Russia, then hop a ferry to Korea and Japan. After giving up jobs and apartments and years of saving, I was going to finish my tour around the world.

So when every border closed and every flight was cancelled, leaving me homeless and stranded, naturally I had to come up with something else. My new goal: Find dinosaur bones while riding my motorcycle.

My partner and I loaded my Kawasaki KLX125 and his KLX250 into the back of our similarly green old Chevy pickup that had served as our home since the botched round-the-world trip. Dirt and trail riding has never been my thing, having spent the vast majority of my decade-long riding career in the canyons and on the racetrack, but for the sake of this mission, I was going to learn. And how better to do that than on an unintimidating, eight-horsepower bike made for children? If a 10-year-old can do it, I can too.

Probably.

Hopefully.

Maybe…

We drove from Southern California to Northern Montana, with a few dirt-bike-boot-camp pit stops in between, and stopped into a local museum near the small town of Choteau, where they offered opportunities to join their paleontologists for a dig. This way, professionals could show us the ropes on what to look for and how to find bones.

Montana has a number of prehistoric rock formations that were exposed as the glaciers of the Ice Age scraped away the land over the last couple million years. The Two Medicine formation, where we were today, was home of countless Hadrosaurus, the duck-bill dinosaur that served as the cattle of the time. The Judith River formation to the east was home to the Ankylosaurus (the dinosaurs with the wrecking balls on their tails!) and all sorts of aquatic life, and the Hells Creek formation beyond was habitat for both the Triceratops and the legendary Tyrannosaurus Rex.

We loaded up in a van and they drove us to a dig site, where they taught us about “float fossils.” Given enough time, especially with the harsh climate of Montana’s frozen, windy winters and scorching summers, fossils were naturally revealed as the land fell away. In essence, the bones would “float” to the surface, and paleontologists would follow the trail of landslides to the source in hopes of finding a more complete skeleton. Badlands, where there’s limited vegetation to hold the dirt in place, were the easiest places to witness this simple phenomenon.

The day passed by with picks and paint brushes, and we left with what I hoped was enough knowledge to find bones on our own. With bikes in tow, we followed the Hi-Line over toward the bustling town of Havre, Montana. Beyond the mall, past the buffalo jump, the underground city and the 15 dive bars, rested a range of badlands known as the Judith River formation. And more importantly, it housed the underutilized Fresno OHV park, so unknown and forgotten that even on a perfect Saturday morning we had the entire place to ourselves. It was a top-down kind of park, where you park atop a plateau and descend into the valleys below.

For me, new to riding in the dirt, the drop was as intimidating as it was steep. Slopes of dry black dirt crumbled under my tires with the loose texture of riding over mounds of popcorn. There were no real trails. No hard-packed or well trodden path to rely on. Just random tire tracks on random mountainsides, haphazardly strewn about the 82-acre park.

With a deep breath, I inched my tires towards the edge of the plateau, tipping ever closer to the point of no return. A 400-foot drop was all that stood between myself and Jurassic Park. I revved my little engine, whose blaring exhaust note far exceeded the actual power output, and pushed off into the abyss.

My tires dug a noticeable rut all the way to the bottom, where I immediately shifted my focus to searching for traces of prehistoric life. I eyed every rock and dried cow pie with suspicion. But with no luck, we knew we had to go deeper.

Unfortunately, deeper meant either jumping a washed-out coulee or climbing over increasingly steep hills. My fear threshold found the coulees tempting, but the chances of clearing a five-foot gap was… ambitious. The mounds were the only option.

I gave the bike my all to get up the first hill, then I tried to give it as little as possible to get back down the other side. I barreled down the popcorn, both tires squirming beneath me, with only the engine braking of first gear and sloppy use of the rear brake to slow me down. There was nothing for my tires to grip as the ground gave way beneath my spinning wheels, but gravity threw me forward whether I was ready or not. At the bottom, my troubles escalated, as I pitched my bike up a tall ledge, hidden by a mud puddle. The bike made it to the other side. I didn’t.

But once I dragged all 250 pounds of KLX125 out of the bog, the park opened into an expanse of flatland. It felt like a high five after a job not that well done.

We cruised along through a set of UTV tracks that powered toward the Milk River, rolling over undulating hills, and stopping sporadically at the landslide areas along the way. A few miles in, we came upon a cliffside sparkling with prehistoric sea shells. It was a sign we were getting closer, but still not the jackpot we were looking for. We searched on and on, but as the scorching sun was high in the sky and our last water bottle was depleted, we at long last decided to call it a day.

I suppose if finding dinosaurs was easy, everyone would do it.

We made our way back to the mud puddle and the hills, while still skimming the bases of the towering badlands above. We were nearly back when my partner stopped, and waved me over with wild excitement.

At the bottom of a hill, across an open plain, a spatter of bone fragments was piled at the base of the erosion, scattered about with no obvious order. I jumped off my bike, so excited I nearly dropped it, and started searching the area further.

The fragments were small but distinct, with the smooth lines of cellular bone structure and fossilized marrow clearly visible inside. We were combing the area further when the glisten of black caught my eye, just peeking out of the dirt. I used a rock to break away the hard pack, then used my fingers to dust away the rest. Beneath the ground was a smooth, fossilized tooth, sharp and narrow with shiny, well preserved enamel. The size, the shape, and the serrations told the story of a small predator. A prehistoric alligator maybe? A raptor?

I’d need more clues.

But the nature of finding vertebrate fossils on public land comes with a lot of red tape. Knowing we couldn’t legally take these bones home, we contacted the local museum, and started the process of getting a permit to excavate. The local paleontologist was beside himself with excitement, the local BLM manager was just as thrilled, and the head of the Bureau of Reclamation is currently working the excavation into their schedule.

It could be months before we know what we found, but as for my childhood dreams? We can consider those fulfilled!