“I really had to pee,” she recalls. “And it was all private land, and I’m like, what am I gonna do?”
Up ahead, she saw what appeared to be a kids camp—what she later found to indeed be a kids camp dedicated to dinosaurs.
“So I scurried over there, poked my head in the tent, and there’s this guy. I introduced myself: ‘Hi, I’m India, and can I use your outhouse?’ And he was like, ‘You’re India Wood!’”
The guy excitedly introduced this wanderer to the kids and told of how, when she was around their age, she uncovered one of the great fossils in state history. Wood was 12 in 1979 when she dug up the Allosaurus now on display at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
Alas, even on bathroom breaks, the reputation has followed her.
But on that summer day in 2020, Wood was on her way to accomplishing another feat, adding another chapter to her remarkable, colorful life story.
Last year, she finished an expedition she called “Colorado X,” a segmented walk that had her crisscrossing the state from corner to corner in two separate diagonals.
“The first question I always get when I say I walked across Colorado is, ‘Oh, so you hiked the Colorado Trail?’” Wood says. “And it’s like, well, for 100 miles yeah, but (otherwise) just wherever I could put it.”
For her first transect in 2020, starting in the state’s southeast corner and ending in the northwest corner—not too far from where she found that Allosaurus—Wood logged 732 miles over 65 days. That was mostly on paved roads or through unpaved ranches. In 2022 for the second leg, from the northeast corner down to the southwest corner, Wood recorded 739 miles over 70 days.
