Arizona

PETRIFIED FOREST NATIONAL PARK & PAINTED DESERT
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Petrified Forest National Park & Painted Desert, Arizona

	This was one of those great accidental stops.  We were headed for Canyon de Chelly in the Navajo Reservation, but realized that Petrified Forest NP was only a 25 mile detour, which we probably would have regretted missing.  We made a good choice.  Not only did we get to walk through a fairly dense collection of petrified stumps and logs at dusk (more on this below), but we got to see the famed “Painted Desert,” which we both agreed the Park Service should really add to the name of the park. Plus, we got an extra hour to view the sites because AZ (HI too) does not observe daylight savings time.  We knew this somewhere in the recesses of the Jeopardy file, but to have it actually affect our lives was sort of cool.  

	The Painted Dessert is the perfect introduction to Southwest geology, especially at sunset when we hit it.  At this point the terrain is still essentially shallow canyons, and dune like formations capped with “Tepees,” but the color stratification is amazing, ranging from pale white sandstone to, reddish hematite (iron oxide), to redder silt stone, and finally the clay Tepees which are a deep maroon/purple. These sights are best observed by lookouts along a 6 mile ridge which begins at the Painted Desert Visitor Center.  A hike down would probably be fun as well, but the bird’s eye perspective would be lost, trails are pretty limited, and backcountry trips are tough to do for more than a night because there is no flowing water in the park during most of the year.

	Continuing south through the park, we stopped at Puerco Pueblo.  The Pueblo holds ruins of Ancestral Puebloans who lived it the area between A.D. 1250 -1400.  Some building foundations remain, and several petroglyphs (carved, whereas pictographs are painted) remain which depict daily life, and spirituality.

	Unfortunately, darkness had pretty much set in but, with the little remaining light, we ventured into Crystal Forest, which has a high concentration of petrified wood that you can get within feet of.  These petrified logs are 225 million year old trees which were toppled, washed into the floodplain, covered with silt, mud, and volcanic ash, and then consequently deprived of oxygen which slowed the logs decay.  This allowed silica laced water to seep through the wood, replacing it with that silica.  As time went on, the silica crystallized into quartz, which of course is a rock, and completely devoid of any of the properties of wood.  It’s the quartz that gives petrified wood its beautiful multi-colored cross sections.  Definitely glad we made this stop.
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