Thanks to an unfortunate traffic incident (Traffic? In California? On a Friday afternoon? Nah!), I arrived at the Jurupa Mountains Discovery Center a scant thirty minutes before they closed for the day. I booked it into their information desk/gift shop area to inquire about purchasing two adult admission tickets, and was pleased to learn that in the Jurupa Mountains, discovery comes free of charge. I was a little less pleased when the employee recommended that I check out their museum and another chimed in with “You can’t, I already closed it up for today because I didn’t think anyone else was coming.” Your psychic abilities leave much to be desired, sir. And evidently unlocking the door was a bridge too far. It’s fine, the grounds themselves contained more than thirty minutes of discovery possibilities, so I got cracking.
In addition to the closed museum, the Jurupa Mountains Discovery Center spans nine acres, acting as a botanical garden, nursery, turtle zoo, and chock full of something that lured me to their gates: dinosaur sculptures. Everywhere, all kinds. The website proclaimed that they have “over ten” dinosaur sculptures, and I was going to do my damndest to see how many I could find.
I think it may be time to update their website with a new dinosaur count, because even at eighteen, I’m pretty sure I didn’t see them all. Plus “over fifteen” or “almost twenty” sounds far more impressive than “over ten”. There were multiple areas that were closed off without a guide, I never made it into the turtle area, and nine acres is a lot of ground to cover in thirty minutes, even for two highly motivated adults. There were so many non-dinosaur related things to see as well, and as someone who has ooh-d and aaah-d and killed many a plant, this place was right up my alley. What I’m saying is, I wouldn’t object if my local nursery started filling up with dinosaur sculptures to get me in there a little more often.