A visit to the Petrified Forest can be an exciting full day of surprises or a simple one hour drive through an especially photogenic area. Located in the Painted Desert of northern Arizona, the park is right off Interstate 40. Travelers headed west across I-40 toward Nevada and California should enter the park at Exit 311. Those coming from southern Arizona on Route 77 and folks heading east on I-40 should head to the park’s southern entrance just off of State Route 180.
Petrified Forest National Park’s road is a 28 mile long self-guided tour. Entering from I-40, your visit should start off at the Painted Desert complex. Here you can watch the park film at the Visitor Center, visit the Petrified Forest Museum Association bookstore, have lunch at the Painted Desert Oasis restaurant or buy a souvenir at the Fred Harvey gift shop. The film, Timeless Impressions, is shown every half-hour on a giant screen and is a great introduction to the park.
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Top: The Painted Desert complex is a great place to start. Bottom: Petrified wood chunks in the Painted Desert Wilderness. Photos by KSJ.
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From the Visitor Center, the road takes you about three miles north past Painted Desert overlooks. At each of eight stops you see the pinks and reds of the desert, which is named for its beautiful colored soils. From these look-outs, you’re seeing the park’s Painted Desert Wilderness, an area of more than 40,000 acres. The Painted Desert Wilderness Area was set aside in 1972 as the first such area in the national park system. A second wilderness area is in the southern part of the park. What sets a wilderness apart from other areas is that there are no man-made items (roads or telephone poles, for instance) in it. The ground in the wilderness is covered by petrified wood, but from the mesa the road is located on it is hard to see them. .
The historic Painted Desert Inn, the park’s first visitor center, gift shop and restaurant, is now a museum open from 9am to 5pm daily. Inside are murals painted by Hopi artist Fred Kabotie and a skylight that was hand-painted by Civilian Conservation Corps workers in the 1930s. [Author’s note: The Inn will be featured in a future article.]
Back on the road, visitors leave the colorful reds of the Painted Desert behind and turn south into a section of grassland. Keep your eyes open and you may spot some pronghorn, elk, deer or even prairie dogs.
Just before the park road heads across an I-40overpass is a rusty old car in a field. This stretch was once a section of U.S. Route 66, America’s main street. One of the earliest interstate roads, the ‘mother road’ ran from Chicago, Illinois to Santa Monica, California from the 1920s to the 1970s. Even though it was 2,297 miles long, Petrified Forest was the only national park system site that the road went through.
Eleven miles into the tour is Puerco Pueblo, the site of stabilized ruins of an Ancestral Puebloan village. On rocks just below the rim of the paved trail are numerous petroglyphs. More than 600 petroglyphs are visible about a mile away at Newspaper Rock, where viewing scopes are set up to aid in seeing the ancient art.
Leaving the grasslands one enters into the area where the Painted Desert is blue, gray and lavender. The Teepees, geological hills named for their shape, are located just before the left hand turn into the Blue Mesa area. One of the prettiest sections of the park, Blue Mesa is an area where one can see thousands of pieces of wood and even whole petrified logs.
In some places, petrified logs have fallen over small ravines, forming what look like bridges. What actually happened, though, is that the trees were sturdier than the surrounding land was and over time the soil under these logs eroded away leaving the log spanning air. Agate Bridge is one such log. The cement support visible under the log was placed there over a century ago to keep it from falling down.
A little further south at Jasper Forest is an area that was once covered with pieces of wood. The taking of petrified wood (or any resource) from the park not only changes the landscape but results in heavy fines. Taking even a small piece of petrified wood changes the scene forever, denying future visitors a chance to see this wonderland.
The Crystal Forest stop features a walking trail that literally meanders through a rock garden. On sunny days the crystals in the wood shine with reflected sunlight.
At Mile Marker 26 the Rainbow Forest area comes into view. The Rainbow Forest Museum has displays about life in the Triassic and the animals that lived back then. The park’s film is also shown here and there’s another bookstore and gift shop. Behind the Museum is a short walk called the Giant Logs Trail. There are a few steps along this four-tenths of a mile trail which winds in and out of a group of huge trees. Old Faithful, the largest, is almost nine feet in diameter. A much longer trail from the north end of the Rainbow Forest parking lot leads to the Long Logs and Agate House trails.
For more info: You can contact Karen Sweeny-Justice at pefowriter@gmail.com.
Visit the park's official website at: www.nps.gov/pefo
Comments
Awesome article. I feel like I have visited the park! Thanks.
Great post, Karen. Really makes me want to visit the area. And your details are wonderful.
Well-written and so accurately descriptive. We enjoyed our visit as a reminder that this earth and nature itself is more powerful than we can ever be.
Once again great article.
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