Exploring petrified forest was educational, beautiful and awe inspiring. This National Park is really amazing. There are massive logs everywhere, that are not wood, but stone! The history is fantastic and the park stretches into the Painted Desert in it’s northern end, with some really overwhelming color pallets. It looks like a different world!
Rough road getting in!
Before we could get to exploring petrified forest, we had to get there. We chose to come in the south entrance, go through the park and exit at the Painted Desert on I-40 for a quick escape after a full day of peopling.
Driver beware. The road going south from Holbrook Arizona, to the entrance of the park is paved, in name only. I am fairly certain we have been on smoother lava flows.
Finally, exploring Petrified Forest National Park
The park is a short drive off the main road. The visitor center, gift shop, a small museum and 2 of the best trails are all located within walking distance of the same parking lot! Bonus!
So, in case you have never been here, or do not understand what this is about…basically, there was an ancient forest located next to a large river. Enter cataclysm stage left, trees fall down (not sure if they made a noise, no one was there to hear it), and they created a huge log jam in the river. Picture a logging operation with giant logs all floating up against each other in the river.
They get stuck, water logged, fall down to the bottom of the river. There they get covered in silt, minerals, mud, etc – where the painstakingly long process begins. Each individual organic cell of the tree becomes replaced by minerals – turning the tree to stone! No Medusa necessary.
Walking out into the “Forest”
These were truly amazing. It is a shame, because pictures do not do them justice. We were awestruck exploring petrified forest. Some of them appear to still have bark! However, it is not even petrified bark, it is a rock layer mimicing the heartwood directly under the bark. Very few had their bark petrified.
Exploring Petrified Forest, AKA, the log jam
We finished up the walk close to the museum and wandered about a mile down the road and walked out into the desert. None of us had a horse with no name, so on foot we went! It was about a mile of desert before the log jam, but the easy to read sign everyone was ignoring let you know that.
This walk was ostensibly to a hut made by the initial crew out of petrified trees that mapped and created the park. We decided that was lame, so did not go out that way, but we did love seeing the “log jam”. It is literally a huge field (several hundred acres) of monster sized petrified trees. These were the ones that caused the traffic jam that created the situation that allowed it all to happen.
We loved Exploring Petrified Forest!
It was amazing. We laughed, we cried, it was much better than “Cats” and we may go see it again. It is truly staggering how large the scope of time on this *ahem* I mean “our” planet is. We are but a blink of the eye in the grand scheme of things, yet get to live at the same time as twinkies. Truly a wondrous world.
Have you ever visited anything that restructured how you viewed something? If so, please write it down with a piece of chalk on a slate and send it to me! (That was only 100 years ago! Time is so fickle!). Seriously, drop a line in the comments and let us know!
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