DINOSAUR NATIONAL MONUMENT, Utah - I admit it. I haven't seen "Jurassic Park" yet.

But while everyone else is watching the movie about bio-engineered dinosaurs running amuck, I went to see what's left of the real thing in the lonely, rugged hills of northeast Utah.

No snarling velociraptors here. Just bones and more bones - a jumble of more than 1,600 dinosaur bones that have been preserved for tens of millions of years through a series of natural quirks.

The spiny stegosaurus, long-necked apatosaurus (also known as brontosaurus), knife-toothed allosaurus - they're all here in a rock quarry that has revealed some of the best dinosaur remains in the world.

Scientists, who pried some nearly complete skeletons out of the rocky ridge in the early 1900s, helped persuade the the U.S. government to create Dinosaur National Monument in 1915 to protect the site. It's now one of the best and most accessible places in North America to get close to dinosaurs in their natural state - a real-life Jurassic Park.

At the Dinosaur Quarry, the bones of about a dozen species jut out of a vertical rock face about 50 feet high and 200 feet long - here a skull, there a rib, over there a toe. It's like a giant puzzle, spotting the fossilized bones sticking out of the sandstone and figuring out what was who.

A glass-walled building has been constructed over the rock face to protect the bones. There's a viewing platform, displays and

reconstructions of dinosaurs and a glassed-in lab where visitors sometimes can watch scientists at work. (Dinosaur bones are no longer removed from the quarry but are still being exposed and studied.)

So how did all these dinosaurs end up here?

This corner of Utah is a high-desert, tough land where, these days, everything - plant, animal and human - struggles to survive. But about 145 million years ago, during the dinosaurs' Jurassic-period reign, it was a semi-tropical place of rivers, streams, ferns and trees. It was lush, wet and just right for dinosaurs who liked their greenery: a single apatosaurus may have munched as much as three-quarters of a ton of plants each day.

When most dinosaurs died (of old age, fights, whatever) their bones just decayed. But some dinosaur carcasses washed onto a sandbar in an ancient river near what is now the Dinosaur Quarry.

To make a millions-years-long story short, these bones were buried and preserved in the tons of sediments that eventually smothered the river, turned the sandbar into sandstone and fossilized the bones. As the Rocky Mountains rose to the east, the cracking and shifting of the earth brought up the ancient riverbed; weather and gravity gradually exposed the dinosaur bones to 20th-century scientists and tourists.

Rich as it is, Dinosaur Quarry is pretty tame compared to "Jurassic Park" (I have at least read the book). But for anyone who can use a little imagination, it's one of the easiest ways to get close to what's left of real dinosaurs.

Beyond the bones, Dinosaur National Monument offers 211,000 acres of high-desert plateaus, pine-dotted mountains and river canyons sprawling from the northeast corner of Utah into western Colorado.

But this isn't an easy park to explore. Distances are long (Harpers Corner, the park's most scenic drive, needs about a half-day) and there are few paved roads and few hiking trails. There's no gas, food or lodging within the park and the campgrounds are basic. River-rafting along the remote, roadless canyons of the Green and Yampa rivers is one of the best ways to explore the park.

The weather at Dinosaur often is baking hot in summer and frigid in winter - temperatures can vary by 150 degrees between January and July. Most of the parkland is above 5,000 feet. Desert winds send sagebrush tumbling; violent thunderstorms can wash out dirt roads and flood gullies.

So what's the reward? Even car-based visitors, who veer just a little off the beaten track in Dinosaur National Monument, can get a feel for the West as it used to be - rugged, lonely big-sky country where only a bird's call breaks the silence. It's a place to find solace in empty spaces.