Petrified Forest National Park is near Holbrook, Arizona and Highway 40, and the old Route 66 goes right through both. It’s our 13th national park to see during our two-month travel trip, and the last one before we head home.
This National Park is located in high desert country, about 5,000′ elevation, and we learned that 310 million years ago this part of the world used to be near the equator. Forests, sea-life, and dinosaurs were in this land before tectonic plates moved it 2,000 miles to the north to form the continents we know today.
Trees, once living near rivers, were buried 200 feet during one era, and a mile deep in a subsequent era of time. Colorful minerals seeped into the tree cells to petrify their shape into a rock formation of their outline. Harder than the ground around them, these trees survived over the eons. The petrified logs came back to the surface by further geologic forces and erosion. And now we get to see these beauties that are abundantly found throughout the park.
Also exposed on this land are the colorful layers of dirt and rock formed over the eons which now form a painted desert with colorful and inspirational views.
Although each state in our country have some petrified trees, this area is the largest collection of them in the world.
A showcase of petroglyphs captures thousands of years of the human story . In 1905 John Muir explored this area. And in 1906, Teddy Roosevelt established this as the Petrified Forest National Monument, saying “It appears that the public good would be promoted by reserving these deposits of fossilized wood as a National monument with as much land as may be necessary for the proper protection thereof.” It became a protected National Park in 1962.
On the way to this park, we took another detour through Phoenix to see two very good friends. We enjoyed lunch with Ernie Bringas (the youth group minister at the church where we met in 1970) on Wednesday. We stopped by Rimrock, near Sedona, to see longtime friend Dave Rupel, and he joined us to visit Petrified Forest National Park, as seen in the first picture above.
It was a great visit to Arizona and we loved being at Petrified Forest which is a magical and mystical park that celebrates and honors impressive changes over time and the people who once inhabited this space. This park was far more than we expected.