Bill, Beth, and Matthew's Ramblings: Petrified Forest National Park

This famous park is made up of two main parts - the petrified forest area at the south entrance and the painted desert area at the north entrance. We started at the south and worked our way to the north.

As soon as we entered the park we were amazed at the quantity, size, and color of the petrified rock. We took some short hikes close to the visitor's center.

The world was a very different place 220 million years ago. This area of Arizona was part of a shallow sea. Massive floods knocked over trees and rolled them down rivers to this area, to be deposited and covered with silt. Over the years, the cells in the trees were replaced by minerals, mostly quartz. Later erosion has revealed the petrified logs to us today. Many of them are simply lying on top of the ground, but in other parts of the park they are buried and you can see the erosion around them.

This is an amazing place. Teddy Roosevelt made it a National Monument in the early 1900s and it became a National Park in the 1960. Theft of the rock is a big problem. There are many rock shops around the area and they sell petrified wood that has been found on private lands. There's LOTS of it! We were also surprised to learn that petrified wood has been found in every state!

On the Long Logs trail we found one tree that we estimated to be over 120 feet long, as you can see below.

We drove around to other parts of the park. There is a "badlands" area called Blue Mesa where we saw lots of erosion. In some cases the petrified tree is on top of sandstone and protects it from erosion, forming a column.

We also saw "Newspaper Rock" (from a distance), a set of hundreds of pictographs carved in the stone.

It turns out that at one time, Route 66 passed through the Park, but not much of it remains.

In the 1930, the Civilian Conservation Corps restored guest house on the property. This served as a restaurant in later years. We saw a menu where coffee was 10 cents and a hamburger was 50 cents!