Awe-Inspiring Sights to See in Petrified Forest National Park

Far-flung Petrified Forest National Park just dropped into my itinerary when we tripped to Sedona over Fall Break last year. When it’s just a bit over a couple of hours’ drive from there, how could we not go see its Painted Deserts and Rainbow Forest! We got to see Native American Petroglyphs and ruins of ancient Pueblos, as well.

Petrified Forest National Park

This park in Arizona gets its name from the large amounts of petrified wood found here. By the way, this Petrified Forest is different from another Petrified Forest you might have read about, here on this blog. The one featured here earlier was mostly redwood trees petrified by volcanic ash from Mt. Helena in Napa, California. This Petrified Forest you are going to visit today, lies on the eastern side of the state of Arizona. The wood here, however, seems to have been petrified by water. (More about Petrification, later in this post.)

Petrified trees aren’t the only things preserved in this national park in the Southwest. There are colorful badlands, remnants of early Native American settlement in the area, a part of the original Route 66, and of course, the trees that have turned into stone. This vast desertland was once a site of tropical forests say the fossils of trees, plants and animals found in the area. While they date back millions of years, other things found in these parts talk of later and more recent native life in the area. As tribes sojourned here during their travels to the West, they built communities, hunted, gathered and traded, say archaeological finds.

Broadly speaking, this National Park has two parts: The Painted Desert and The Rainbow Forest. The Painted Desert where you see colored landscapes, lies towards the north. As you travel south you move into what the Park calls Rainbow Forest, which is actually a reference to the Petrified Wood found here. The park has a main road — the Petrified Forest Road that runs north-south through the park. You can enter either way depending on what you would like to see first, or last, and exit the park the other way.

We chose to start with the Painted Desert so we made our way to the North Entrance just off Interstate 40.

Painted Desert

A few miles into the northern part of the park, the road led us to an area where the otherwise dry and scanty desert vegetation gave way to a large reddish patch of land that looked like a work of art — an outdoor painting of red hills with lighter bands and patches on it.

Look at these sights from Tiponi Point

A few other stops that followed. Tawa Point, Kachina Point, Whipple Point and Lacey Point showed us more of the painted desert with some variations in the lay of the land, and some more colors and shades. There are some small trails too to allow you to slow down and take in the mesmerizing views.

Now, how did this desert get painted?

Apparently, the badlands here are part of the Chinle Formation that dates back to when the earth still had the supercontinent of Pangea.

The Chinle Formation consists mainly of sandstone and mudstone layers, which were deposited by a vast river in a forest ecosystem, says an interpretative panel at Tiponi Point. It goes on to say —
All of the colors you see are caused by the iron in the sediments. During deposition, dry weather allows the minerals to be exposed to oxygen, rusting the iron and creating red, brown, and orange colors. Wet weather can drown the sediments, allowing little or no contact with oxygen causing the layers to be blue, gray and purple.

Later, as we drove to the middle portion of the park, it seemed to have more colored landscapes, only with darker colors; the blues and purples taking over. The rock mounds here got taller too. And scattered around were pieces of tree trunks that had turned into stone.

Blue Zone

Sights from the Blue Forest and Blue Mesa areas of Petrified Forest National Park lie towards the heart of the park. To get to this area, we left the Petrified Forest Road and turned left to the Blue Mesa Scenic Road. The road is around 3.5 miles long and has a few overlooks where you can stop and look at the colors of the land and see some petrified wood. There are a couple of trails too.

Teepees 

More color, more shapes and some taller formations, here.

Petrified Forest

As we drove south, we began to see more and more of those trees that had turned into stone. We stopped at Jasper Forest Overlook, which is said to have had the largest collection of petrified wood. And then there was Crystal Forest, which allowed us to get on to trails that twisted through the petrified wood strewn generously on the low hills.

Jasper Forest

Crystal Forest

And how did all these trees get Petrified?

Centuries ago, when the earth was home to the supercontinent of Pangea, what we could now call ‘prehistoric trees,’ from forests around here, fell, got washed, and got treated by the water they lay in. The minerals in the water seeped into the tree trunks turning them into rocks.

The texture of the bark of these trees is intact. The rings on the trees are still visible too. The rocks they have turned into, come in different colors owing to the minerals that helped petrify them.

How were these trees cut to perfection?

When you look around these fallen stumps, that’s one thing you’ll wonder about — just how did they get cut so perfectly?! It was a question that arose in my then 12-year old’s mind too. The answer to that, we found at the Crystal Forest.

An information board here told us that —

The settling of a heavy quartz log causes cracks and eventually breaks. Because it is the shortest distance for the crack to grow, the log breaks perpendicular to its length, like a piece of brittle chalk. The repeating perpendicular breaks make the logs look like they were sawed or cut.

What to know before you visit Petrified Forest National Park

• The Park can be visited in a day
• You can enter the park through the north or south entrances and drive the length of the park, making stops a the vista points and trailheads.
• Petrified Forest Road is around 28 miles long
• Make sure to visit both parts of the park (Painted Desert and Petrified Forest) to make the most of your visit.
• The park is in Arizona’s desertland so make sure to stay hydrated. Don’t forget to carry ample water for your hikes.

PS: The rocks here are not supposed to be picked up. While I spoke to a ranger at the ranger station near Puerco Pueblo, she mentioned that the park loses a lot of these precious rocks that it has been trying to preserve.

If you’d like to take home a souvenir from here, there are shops at the visitor centers and just outside the park too, where they sell rocks found in the area around the park area.

If you’d like to see more colorful landscapes painted by Mother Nature, you’ll be mesmerized at —
Painted Hills in Oregon
Artist Drive & Artist Palette Death Valley, California.

If you’ve been fascinated by the petrified wood, you might also want to go see —
Petrified Forest in Napa, California.

Linking to —
Pictorial Tuesday
My Corner of the World
Thursday Tree Love

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