Skyline Drive is an interesting diversion if you ever find yourself in the Cañon City, Colorado area. Built in 1905 by inmates from the adjacent Colorado Territorial Prison, Skyline Drive snakes its way across the crest of a large hogback west of town. The very narrow, one-way road begins at a Craftsman-style stone arch, which was constructed in the 1930s and contains rocks from all 48 of the US states that existed at the time.
The hogback here is part of the Dakota Hogback that stretches along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains all the way from Wyoming down into New Mexico. The hogback is comprised of sediments that were washed down from the Ancestral Rockies, then uplifted during the Laramide Orogeny beginning approximately 70-80 million years ago.
As you begin the drive up the road, it’s hard to imagine that this route actually used to be a two-way road. This is a seriously narrow road with steep drop-offs and no guardrails, so if you’re at all intimidated by heights (or depths), it might not be a good idea to attempt to drive on this road.
About a mile into the drive, you will come upon an area known as the Dinosaur Trackway. In 1999, University of Colorado paleontology student, William Kurtz, discovered a large set of dinosaur footprints imbedded in the rocks at the top of the ridge.
According to the Dinosaur Depot Museum’s website:
These tracks were made during the early Cretaceous Period, approximately 107 million years ago. During that time this area was on the edge of the Western Interior Seaway. A group of dinosaurs were walking side by side through the mud along the edge of an estuary, probably eating the plants. The tracks were then filled in by sand and plant debris, which hardened to preserve them as casts of the actual tracks. After the sediments were deposited, the walls of the basin were raised by the Rocky Mountain uplift that tilted the rocks on edge. This explains why they bulge out instead of being a depression like one normally thinks of as a “footprint”.
I find it utterly amazing that this road was heavily used for close to 100 years before someone discovered that there were dinosaur footprints right there all along!!
While not for the faint-of-heart, the drive along Skyline Drive is definitely worth the trip.
The rain continued for a while, but I was eventually treated to a fresh batch of blue sky and a very pleasant (but long) walk back to the trailhead. 
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