Petrified Shmetrified (July 4)

Painted Desert

Petrified Forest National Park is kind of a joke in my family. We almost always refer to it as “Petrified Shmetrified” and I can do that without even thinking about it. Petrified Forest National Park is a long skinny park that includes the Painted Desert area just north of highway 40 to the area of big logs extending south of Holbrook. I forget how many acres it is, but it is a fairly large area considering the stunning lack of trails and access points.

When I heard “petri- fied forest” for the first time, I thought of standing trees (and that is what I thought when I heard of lava trees in Hawaii and Oregon too), but that is not the case. It is a forest simply because of its wood products – in many cases very large logs- large in terms of length and in girth. Most of the logs are broken because of the shifting of the substrate around them, but many are still laying in more or less complete lengths. But that is the thing, they are all laying down, none standing upright.   

Petrified wood is wood that basically got buried in wet sediment and slowly the organic components of the wood are replaced with minerals. Different minerals make the petrified wood different colors, but the predominant color is reddish brown, though greens, yellows, blacks, whites, and others are possible. The shape and texture of the wood is pretty much preserved so at a quick glance petrified logs look like regular logs. Petrified wood can occur just about anywhere around the world, but I do not think it is all that common to find a lot of it in one place except maybe in this area of Arizona.

I tried not to be too pessimistic for Aaron since he had never been, and maybe I succeeded. Interestingly enough we talked with a ranger while there who was surprised I had been before (at my age). He said most people come once when they are little when they are dragged on a family vacation and then again when they are retired. Maybe everyone makes fun of petrified wood? The truth is I do think petrified wood is really interesting and find it beautiful. So we made a day of it and decided to stop at every pull out and hike every trail – not a tall order by any means, but it would probably take some time.

Because we came in the south entrance, our first stop was the visitor center and the trail that loop de loops behind it. Logs, pieces of logs, and splinters of petrified wood are EVERYWHERE. I imagine it is hard to take heed of the guidelines not to pick up and keep any petrified wood because it appears to be everywhere right there at the visitor center and laying around visible within the park, but also because of the prolific amount of shops in the area selling it. PFNP only protects about 10% of the petrified wood in Arizona and a lot of it was probably removed before establishment of the park and by protection that didn’t start until the thirties, the rest of Arizona’s petrified wood is spread on adjoining lands, much of them owned by Indians.

Just down from the visitor center is the Big Logs Trail, about three miles, that winds through even more preserved wood and large logs. This trail is the longest one to hike, but it is mostly paved and gently graded. Pretty if you are not tired of petrified wood and easy. Honestly Aaron and I needed this easy trail because we are not acclimated to the higher elevation. Even gentle hills find us just a tad short of breath. There is also a petrified wood pueblo which is neat looking because of the petrified wood, but it is a reconstruction based on what archaeologists thought it may have looked, but they really aren’t sure.

Blue Mesa Trail

All in all there are about 15 pull outs and most of them have vistas or little paths to a vista that are 500 feet or less, some are more strenuous at a quarter of a mile. It does seem to get tedious to stop at all of them, but they are all in fact different and there is a lot of very different and interesting geology in the park. My favorite was Blue Mesa which had a very steep trail down the mesa that wound between cones of white and purple rocks. I am not sure what the formations are called – erosional hills I guess – they are pretty common in PFNP, but they are different colors in different areas. The purple was pretty neat and the canyon was narrow as you walked in between them. There were also places where you could see petrified wood logs high up the hill just being exposed and ones at the bottom that had been washed out.

All told we hiked about six maybe six and half miles, but it took most of the day because we took the time to stop everywhere and look around. We also took our time because were feeling minor effects of altitude change. We also got sunburned because we made the fatal mistake of a “shady sunburn.” It is cool at Shirley’s because of the high elevation and it was ten to twenty degrees cooler than what we had been experiencing at home and along highway 40 across the country and it was cloudy when we first got there. Ooops. I had sunscreen on my face, but must have forgotten by forehead. We both sunburned the back of our necks and calves including the painful knee pit burn. Live and learn – we haven’t forgotten the sunscreen since.

some of the logs outside of Jim Gray's

No trip to Petrified Forest National Park is complete without a trip to Jim Gray’s. Jim Gray’s is the best rock and petrified wood shop in the area because of its large size and selection and because it is not scary and sketchy like many of the others. Jim Gray has logs and large chunks everywhere outside the store, and inside the store are many polished pieces including polished log rounds that are intended as table tops. I LOVE them for their beautiful colors, but cannot bring myself to shell out the many thousands of dollars to buy one. Two things keep me in check – 1. I don’t the car would like the weight considering the mountains and hills we have yet to climb and 2. How would I ever decide?

Choosing, discarding, choosing again

We had picked up a coupon at the AZ visitor center for a free quarter pound and after checking with the cashier were directed to the rock pile where I got to pick whatever rocks I wanted to make that quarter pound and if I went over I would pay the difference. How fun! I climbed right onto the pile to look for the best pieces and Aaron approved my choices. We collected until we thought we were just over a quarter pound, but turns out it was just an eighth. We could have gone back for more, but how much petrified wood does one need?

One of the cool things about Arizona is how much open sky there is. It is monsoon season (maybe) where large thunderstorms start and end quickly but have high winds and very hard rains. We had seen some in the distance in our travels, but somehow had not driven through one, until this day. The sky gets super dark and is studded with lightning and water builds on the roads because they are not crowned properly. It was raining so hard that we pulled over. We would have pulled over sooner, but the road to Shirley’s is deserted and any pull out that wasn’t paved was quickly flooded because of the impermeable clay layer under the thin layer of soil. We finally find a place to pull over and discovered via the radar on Aaron’s phone that we were in a red storm. We waited about 15 minutes til it let up a bit and then finished the trip home. Shirley’s house was dry when we got there – yet another storm that missed her.