Petrified Forest National Park

I am an east coast girl.  I have lived most of my life east of the Mississippi and the two years I lived west of the Mississippi barely count as distance goes.  Dan and I lived in Davenport, Iowa after business school. If I ever had a notion to scale our roof in Davenport, I would have seen the mighty Mississippi swirling by less than a half mile away.  Technically it counted as west of the Mississippi, but only in the strictest sense of the definition.  So, it is no small wonder that the farther west we travel this fall, the more at home I feel.  I love the country west of the Continental Divide.  It is beautiful and big, lush and spare all at the same time.  Even with winter looming large the landscape is magic. 

Maybe it is the lure of the parks too.  We have missed the parks these past few months.  Acadia and Shenandoah were wonderful but punctuated by civilization in a way that made our east coast travels feel less remote.  Maybe remote is part of what makes the parks so wonderful.  The chance to hide from the world.  To stick our heads in the sand.  We still read the papers every day, we know there is a circus going on, but being out here in the great remote makes the circus matter less.  Much, much less.

Petrified Forest National Park is the first park on our second swing west.  I have never visited the park.  I wasn’t sure what to expect.  I had a vague notion of petrified wood, wood that has turned to stone through some twist of nature, but beyond that I wasn’t sure what it looked like.  At least I wasn’t sure what it looked like in the context of the park; the word “forest” conjures up vertical stands of living trees. 

We entered the park on the north side, just off I-40.  Our guidebook pointed out that this park is one of the most susceptible to the dreaded drive-by visit.  You can literally hop off 40, drive south through the park and then jog west for a few miles to get back on 40. We got there last Thursday afternoon with enough time left in the day to visit the Painted Inn (an old Inn back in the day, now a museum) and take a short hike down the steep mesa and into the Painted Desert that stretches out to the north. 

The next day we did the national park.  I really mean it, we hiked almost all the designated trails and a few of the quasi-designated ones as well (there are several old trails that aren’t marked but that you are permitted to hike).  We found plenty of petrified wood, but we also walked through badlands, saw ancestral homes and petroglyphs and hiked into the desert.  The park is a like a grand mash up of several landscapes in one place.  And true to its name, we did find a forest, an ancient one now turned to stone, but a forest just the same.  Apparently, millions of years ago, what is now Arizona looked more like present day Costa Rica than the desert.  As old trees were washed away by eroding riverbeds they lodged into the muck and slowly petrified as silica and other minerals transformed the tree cells into stone.  Fast forward several epochs and you have the remains of the old forest literally strewn across the desert.  Some of them look like they just fell over, breaking in several places in the fall.  A literal trip back in time.  

It was a wonderful day exploring this remote corner of the world. We all enjoyed the park; more I believe than we expected to.  This is one of the only parks we have encountered thus far that literally closes at night (no doubt to prevent yahoos from looting the trees).  By my reckoning we were one of the last cars out of the gate, with rangers hot on our heels!  A great day.  A great park.  Glad to be back in the land of wide vistas and limited cell signals.