Looking For a Little Whimsey? I Give You Dinosaurs: Welcome to Granger, WA

This weekend we drove our oldest 4+ hours to college and left him there to start his own chapter. It was a teary goodbye — we're going to miss seeing his face every day — but we already know he's going to kick ass and take names.

On the drive home, our modified family of 3 needed a little whimsy. So we took a detour to a town we'd heard about but never actually visited: Granger, Washington — better known to those in the know as "Dinosaur Town."

Why are there dinosaurs in Granger?

Fair question. Granger has never been home to a real dinosaur — in fact, only one dinosaur bone fragment has ever been found in the entire state of Washington, and it wasn't anywhere near here. But drive down Main Street and you'd never guess it. More than 30 concrete dinosaurs — a T. rex, a stegosaurus, a herd of velociraptors, even a sauropelta — are scattered through Hisey Park and around town, with a dinosaur skull worked into the local police department's shoulder patch for good measure.

The story goes back to 1993. Wine tourism was starting to bring visitors into the Lower Yakima Valley, and Granger wanted a piece of that traffic downtown — but it had no wineries or tasting rooms of its own to draw people in. At a community planning meeting, a few ideas were floated: leaning into the town's old brick buildings, or maybe a Spanish/Mexican theme. Instead, they landed on dinosaurs.

In early 1994, the job fell to the town's Public Works Department, a crew that had already been winning float-building awards across the Northwest for years. Their first creation was a baby brontosaurus, built out of wire mesh and concrete using — according to Public Works director Jack Burns — "anything we could find around the shop to hold the cement: oil cans, milk jugs, wadded-up paper." Not exactly high-tech, but it worked. People loved it, so the crew kept going.

Three decades later, Granger is home to more than 30 dinosaurs, and the tradition is still alive: every year on the first Saturday in June, the town holds "Dino-n-a-Day," where residents pitch in to build the next addition to the herd.

We met some friendly dinosaurs, got chased by a few, and joined another for a snack — proof that a town built almost entirely on a gimmick can still deliver an unreasonable amount of joy on a hard day.

If you're relocating to the Puget Sound area, file this away

I work with a lot of people moving to the Puget Sound region from out of state, and one thing that surprises them is how quickly the landscape changes once you head east over the mountains. Granger sits in the Lower Yakima Valley, roughly a 2.5–3 hour drive from Seattle — an easy weekend trip once you're settled, and a good preview of just how different "Washington" can look depending on which direction you drive.

The Yakima Valley is actually the birthplace of Washington's wine industry, home to the state's very first federally recognized wine region, established in 1983. Today it's home to 90+ wineries spread across five distinct tasting areas — Yakima, Naches Heights, Zillah, Prosser, and Red Mountain — all within about 70 miles of each other. Zillah alone has around 20 wineries, several within walking distance of one another, and Prosser's Vintners' Village lets you stroll between more than a dozen tasting rooms without moving your car. Compared to more polished, pricier wine regions, the Yakima Valley has a reputation for being unpretentious — the kind of place where you might end up tasting with the winemaker themselves.

So if you're weighing a move to the Puget Sound region: yes, you'll get the water views, the ferries, the evergreens. But an easy tank of gas also gets you to sun, sagebrush, vineyards, and — apparently — dinosaurs. It's one of my favorite things about calling this part of the world home, and I love helping people relocating here discover it.

Our stop

It was a bittersweet day all around — one chapter ending for our son, a new one starting for our family of three — but we're full-hearted and excited for what's next. Sometimes you just need a little whimsey in the form of a 12-foot concrete triceratops to put it all in perspective.

If you're planning a move to the Puget Sound area and want the real local scoop — not just the listings, but the day trips, the neighborhoods, and the "here's what nobody tells you" — reach out. I'd love to help. 🦕