Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest

Tuesday 24th November

We crossed into Arizona through dry desert then entered the Petrified Forest National Park at its northern end. The Park is a narrow strip of land along a 28 mile stretch of road. The flat desert suddenly opened to reveal canyons with an amazing, coloured, pimpled landscape.








Along the edge were huge cliffs of vivid reds and pinks, while from the floor of the canyon there arose huge mounds with striking bands of blue mauve, pink grey and white - this area is just a small part of the Painted Desert which stretches across several southwestern states. It would seem to be a geologist’s heaven as erosion reveals the different layers laid down over millions of years, with the mounds comprised of harder rocks which have been slower to erode.

Further down the road we encountered the petrified logs after which this park is named. Although it is a desert now, the area was a floodplain several million years ago and millions of trees were washed down into a huge swamp where they became stuck in silt and mud and were then covered in ash from volcanic eruptions, thus preserving them. Over time, the organic material in the logs was replaced by minerals, creating brightly coloured agates and silica structures which preserved the shapes of the logs.










As erosion of the top layers occurs, the petrified logs are exposed, perched on the tops of the huge mounds or encased in the bluffs. The whole of this part of the park is littered with segments of logs which have fragmented as they were washed down the slopes.The outer layers look every bit like the bark of living trees, knotholes and all, whereas the interiors preserve the cellular structure of the wood in are all shades of red, blue/purple and yellow. Apparently the petrified logs once contained many gemstones and quartz pieces, which were plundered by tourists over the last hundred years, along with many small pieces of the petrified wood. The other star feature of this park are the large number of petroglyphs scratched onto huge boulders near Ancestral Pueblo ruins.



Having spent much more time than planned in the park we stopped for the night in nearby Holbrook where we ate in a no-frills local Mexican family cafe, just acoss the road. Though it was a tiny, plain place, where everyone else was speaking Spanish, the food was excellent.