CANON CITY, COLO. ? Along the precarious Skyline Drive in Canon City, there’s a pullout. Stop, park and walk back to see an amazing sight: dinosaur tracks, preserved by natural forces, trotting sideways in the vertical wall along the road.

Those fascinating tracks won’t lead you literally to the Dinosaur Depot in town, but curiosity should.

A 1930s firehouse is the home of the Dinosaur Depot, an operation with one paid curator and a whole bunch of dedicated volunteers.

Many of the volunteers, such as Laura Foreman, take visitors on guided hikes of the nearby Garden Park Fossil Area. If you call ahead, they’ll try to have someone on hand to take you there. At the very least, they’ll give you directions and tell you what to see.

And they’ll urge you to go see the tracks along Skyline Drive, too, if you haven’t already seen them. To get there, head west from Canon City on U.S. Highway 50. The Skyline Drive entrance is marked on your right a few miles out of town.

The tracks were made about 100 million years ago in sandy mud at the edge of an inland sea. They were filled in by sand and plant debris and thus preserved. Geologic eruptions took the chunk of rock in which the tracks are preserved and shoved it upward, skewing it sideways, until it became a wall instead of a floor.

The tracks were discovered two years ago by scientist William Kurtz, who believes they were made by a member of the nodosaur family.

This is just one dinosaur-hunting story told in the museum itself. Exhibits and displays recount the area’s dinosaur finds.

In 1876, dinosaur bones were discovered in the Garden Park area. Soon, competing scientists were digging like mad to outdo each other in what’s now called “the great bone war.”

Some ended up in Eastern museums or in the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. A few are on exhibit here.

Once you’ve seen the museum’s offerings, head to Garden Park. “This is 3,600 acres of Jurassic soil,” says volunteer Foreman, gesturing toward the park’s dry hills and gullies.

“There’s no active dig here,” she says. “Unless, of course, somebody finds something good. Then we have to act right away. Once the fossils are uncovered, they can deteriorate pretty quickly.”