Petrified Forest National Park

Before we left New Mexico, we took a ride over to Arizona to check out the Petrified Forest NP. The park has a 26 mile scenic road that opens up to many beautiful areas. Just a mile from the south entrance and visitor center, the area known as the Painted Desert begins to unfold to park visitors. As you move further down the road, the colors become even more vibrant.

We stopped to check out Newspaper Rock. When you first look at the rocks in this area, they just look like boulders that have a black surface on some of their faces.

But when you zoom in on the rocks, you can see the numerous petroglyphs, or rock carvings.

The next area we checked out is called Blue Mesa. This area, contains some very different colored rocks than those in the Painted Desert area. These formations contain vibrant blue, purple, and gray colors. If you look closely in the pictures below, you can see a paved trail that goes deep into the middle of these beautiful formations.

In Jasper Forrest, you can see a very large concentration of petrified wood. It is very interesting how many of the logs look like they were cut. The NPS gives this explanation, ‘Petrified trees today lie strewn across clay hills and within cliff faces; each log broken into large segments. The quartz within the petrified wood is hard and brittle, fracturing easily when subjected to stress. During the gradual uplifting of the Colorado Plateau, starting about 60 million years ago, the still buried petrified trees were under so much stress they broke like glass rods. The crystal nature of the quartz created clean fractures, evenly spaced along the tree trunk, giving the appearance today of logs cut with a chainsaw.’¹

The Petrified Forest was well worth the trip. The Painted Desert was absolutely gorgeous. A must see if you are in the area

1. https://www.nps.gov/pefo/learn/nature/petrified-wood.htm ↩︎