Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park

Above, the Painted Desert area of Petrified Forest National Park. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Petrified Forest National Park is only about 92 miles from home. I have toured the park once, and that was just the Painted Desert area. I plan on going back to see the Petrified Forest after all the coronavirus lockdowns are over.

Above, the Painted Desert Inn is now preserved as a museum. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

However, if one is curious about Petrified Forest National Park, Outside magazine's website has an article on one visitor's visit to the park.

It begins with:

At Petrified Forest, in northeastern Arizona, when they say the park closes at 6 P.M., they mean it. After driving eight hours from the Guadalupe Mountains of West Texas and through the deserted highways of rural New Mexico, I arrived at a locked gate a few minutes too late, and my plans for a sunset hike went down in flames.

Instead, I had to watch picturesque, feathery clouds turn shades of electric pink from just outside the park’s boundaries. With snow forecast for the next morning, I was going to have a very short window to see the park and make it count. 

After a hearty breakfast at Joe and Aggie’s Café, a down-home Route 66 relic that’s been around since the 1940s, I set off for the park’s most famous area, the Rainbow Forest. Hillsides in every direction were spattered with fluffy, white snow, like a Jackson Pollack painting, a stark contrast to the colorful badlands and deep jewel tones of the area’s petrified trees. 

I elected to hike the three-quarter-mile Crystal Forest Trail as the snow began to let up, sauntering along the paved loop and paying rapt attention to the 200-million-year-old stone logs that lay around me. The place felt spooky and surreal. I tried to picture the landscape as it once was, with Triassic ferns and ginkgoes sprawling across a tropical, green river delta where phytosaurs roamed.  

Petrified Forest can feel like a mind game for most visitors. It forces you to flip your preexisting notion of what a forest is on its head. Rather than straining your neck to take in tall trees, you’re forced to meditate on broken trunks scattered around haphazardly. Once I understood that, the park really came into focus. I began to peer through the petrified trees and the layers of sedimentary rock, envisioning what the place once was: a dense woodland teeming with life.

 The article also has information on where to eat and where to stay.

To read more, go here.