During Christmas break, I get two weeks off of work, so I decided to head back to Florida for those weeks and stay with family. It was my nieces first Christmas! I hit Petrified Forest on this round, and it’s pretty cool because you’re allowed to have dogs on the trails there, which a lot of other parks don’t allow. Petrified Forest is in Arizona in the Navajo and Apache counties. It’s named for its large deposits of Petrified Wood, and historic Route 66 bisects the park. The park is known for its fossils, especially the fallen trees that are from the Triassic period 225 million years ago. It’s crazy to think that this barren desert land used to be a giant forest filled with dinosaurs and lakes.
The Teepees
The most anticipated part of the park for us was the Teepees. They are a badland formation in the Painted Desert and are found directly off of the main road. Their grey, blue, purple, and green deposit stripes are mudstones, and the white sandstone beds are colored by iron, manganese and other minerals.
Crystal Forest
The Crystal Forest is a .75 mile trail that is smothered in petrified wood. Over time all of these downed trees became buried by sediment containing volcanic ash. Groundwater dissolved silicon from the ash and carried it into the logs, where it formed quartz crystals inside the logs. Most of the logs in the park still have their external petrified form, but the entire insides have been crystalized. Due to erosion, this petrified wood has been exposed to what we see today.
Blue Mesa
Blue Mesa has a 1 mile loop trail that goes through the badland hills of blue bentonite clay and petrified wood. There is also petrified wood scattered throughout this trail as well.
Painted Desert
The Painted Desert has a rim trail that is a 1 mile trip. The best time to check it out we noticed is sunrise or sunset, because the hills get this nice golden color on them. The desert is composed of stratified layers of siltstone, mudstone, and shale, which contain the different color pigments. These hills have been fossilized, and then more petrified wood has been exposed from the erosion.
Petrified Forest National Park is a nice quiet park, and you can do just about everything in a day. The trails aren’t that long, and they’re all pretty simple. It’s amazing to think that the trees that you see here today are the same trees that formed a vast wet tropical jungle for this dinosaurs to wander through. All in all it was a neat park, but I’m glad I didn’t make a trip just for this. My dog seems to love it though and I’m sure has some rave reviews.
