Petrified Forest
2/4/01

Petrified Forest was our next national park of call.

 

Arizona's Painted Desert is a beautiful but barren landscape.  The highly pronounced color bands you see in this picture are geological layers from very different eras.  The pink Chinle Formation layer dates back 225 million years to the Triassic Age, while the gray Bidahochi Formation and the dark volcanic layer above it belong to the late Tertiary and dates back only 4 to 8 million years.  What makes the color change so pronounced are over 300 meters (1000 feet) of sandstone that had eroded away between those two ages, which accounts for over 200 million years of missing geological history.

What's more striking is the ecological change which has occurred over that time.  Imagine these eroded cliffs and badlands as a heavily wooded tropical forest dating back to a time when this Arizona "dry zone" was close to the earth's equator.

  



 
 

In the mid 1800's U.S. Army cartographers happened across what they initially thought to be the most unusual rock formations they had seen.  "We really thought that we were looking at a new type of geology..."



 

"...but upon closer inspection, we found that these 'rock formations' were actually fossilized logs."

Over millions of years, all of the wood in the log crystallized into silica, "petrifying" the logs such that they have become harder than rocks.

 

By the mid 19th century, these lands had become a popular tourist destination, and the Painted Desert Inn housed many of these tourists.  This hotel was renovated by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s and turned into a museum, now operated by the National Park Service.



 
 

Navajo artwork on the stain glass ceiling.

 


 
 

Hopi artwork on the walls by Fred Kabotie.



 
 

The Painted Desert Inn, however, was not the first structure built in the Petrified Forest.  This Agate House is another Ancestral Pueblo structure.  It was built circa 1400 A.D. out of blocks of petrified wood.

 


 
 
 

Newspaper Rock contains numerous carvings left by these ancient Native Americans.



 
 

Echo on a high cliff edge taking a picture of the Black Forest.

 


 

On our way out of the park, Echo stops to take one last picture.  Notice the color bands on the mountain.
Journey Onward!