Petrified Forest

Rocks! Trees that are rocks! Rocks that used to be trees!

!!!!!!!!!!!

We began the long weekend (thank you, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for your good work for our world) at Petrified Forest National Park, a place that Mike mentioned he passed on his original drive west in July. He suggested maybe I'd be interested in going there sometime?

TREES THAT ARE ROCKS!

I really loved this park. The biggest impression Arizona has made on me so far is that everything is just so wide, so expansive, so vast-- Petrified Forest was no exception, but in a very different way than I've seen before. Grasslands as far as you could see, occasionally interrupted by a cluster of badland hills, with the Painted Desert around the northern edges. I think what made it feel so immense to me was the fact that I-40/old US-66 and the Santa Fe Railroad bisected the park, but you could watch a train with 100 cars go by and barely hear it. There was nothing for the sound to bounce off. It was sort of eerily quiet, but really peaceful.

We stopped and hiked a lot of the trails in the park. Most of them were reasonably short and accessible. The drives in between the trails were stunning, too, with amazing views of the badlands-- the stripes of sedimentation were really obviously and really cool colors. Grasslands as far as you could see with little specks of Painted Desert, badlands and petrified wood everywhere. So lovely.

The park sadly closes before sunset, but we got to stare at the Painted Desert in the northern end of the park as the sun got lower in the sky, and it was pretty awesome to see the colors just pop. Amazing reds and pinks and blues and greens, with the pale washed out grasses and the big, blue sky. Pretty awesome.

I just love petrified wood. I think it's really cool. Here are at least five reasons why:
1. They are trees and rocks at the same time! That right there is practically my top ten favorite things!
2. It's really pretty.
3. So many different colors from so many different minerals.
4. SCIENCE!
5. There are probably some good metaphors about living things that are somewhat frozen in time or things that are solid that also had life at one time or something. Very poetic, I tell you.
6. Did you know that it requires a diamond saw or dynamite to cut petrified wood? That stuff is serious business.
7. Petrified wood has so many interesting things to say about the geographic environment that it's in, and it's easy to see how that has changed, which is really cool (for example, a lot of the tree rocks we saw in the park were conifers. Conifers! It's all grasslands now with an occasional juniper and maybe another tree or two!).

Well, I got carried away with that. I would keep going on, except most of my reasons would probably just be me stuttering about how much I enjoy trees and rocks and trees that are rocks. It's true though.

Tree of the day: obviously, the ones that are now rocks

So, Petrified Forest? A raving success. That is a lovely park. It was a pretty beautiful day.