Petrified Forest (Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona)

I'm in Arizona for a few days to do some camping and hiking in Canyon de Chelly National Monument with REI. From Phoenix, it's a four or so hour drive and to break up the monotony and give everyone a chance to stretch our legs, we stopped for lunch at Petrified Forest National Park. As this is my first time visiting this park, I was looking forward to exploring a little bit.

While our guides prepared some lunch for the group, most of us explored the Giant Logs Trail behind the Rainbow Forest Visitor's Center. Even though we're well into October, it's still very warm here in the open desert and I'm glad to have had some sun protection on. The trail winds and wanders through some terrific specimen of petrified trees. As I understand it, about 225 million years ago downed trees accumulated in river channels and were often buried by volcanic ash. Over the eons, groundwater carried silica and other minerals from the ash into the logs where it gradually replaced the organic matter and petrified the logs. The beautiful colorations are attributed to this minerals, while the structure is due to the cell walls of the formerly living trees.

I've seen petrified wood many times before, but not in such concentration. The ground is covered with beautiful sections of logs as far as the eye can see in practically every direction. While the crystals now forming the objects are incredibly hard to the touch, there is no mistaking their former incarnation as living trees. The structures are quite obvious. It is curious though that the logs break into such perfect sections, almost as if cut with a chainsaw.

After enjoying a wonderful charcuterie lunch, we climb in the van and continue on our journey, but before too long, we stop at another trail for more sightseeing at he Crystal Forest. Here, we make a loop of approximately half-a-mile through even more stunning examples of the crystalized wood. The quantity of specimen here just blows the mind. To think that all of these 'rocks' were living trees in ages past. In some examples, it's even possible to see the bark separating from the inner wood - astounding!

Finally, we make our way to Newspaper Rock, which is a series of large house-sized boulders with numerous petroglyphs carved into them. The guides made an unplanned stop here after I explained my interest in Native American rock art. The examples here are well worth seeing, but must be viewed at quite a distance unfortunately. One of the guides shares her binoculars with me, which makes the whole stop worthwhile.

After this last stop, we are back on the road and headed for our destination inside Canyon de Chelly. I'm really grateful to our guides for having made this stop. It was well worth it and it was nice to get a little exercise on what would have otherwise been a very lazy day driving to the park.