Today is the 100th Anniversary of Grand Canyon National Park, so I thought I’d write a special post about my time in the park. It can pretty much be summed up in a few words: the Grand Canyon is a hoax. But I’ll expand a bit more… When I entered Grand Canyon National Park, I couldn’t immediately see much of a view. There were more trees than I thought there would be. Don’t worry; trees are not the hoax. I’m pro trees. I love trees. Trees are not the problem. When driving down the main road in the park, there are several places to park, get out of your car, and take in the “view.” And, as I mentioned, the trees blocked the view until you did get out of your car, so I didn’t see it coming. Then… there it is. The Grand Canyon. A beautiful masterpiece of nature, stretching as far as the eye can see. Or is it…? Isn’t it funny that that beautiful view is just out of reach? Well, I mean… not just out of reach. They’d like you to think it’s miles and miles of colorfully carved canyon, but you can’t reach out and feel it, now can you? That’s right! Because it’s all a facade. Literally. No way can a bunch of rock and dirt be that beautiful. But you know what can? A giant image. I don’t know how they made it, maybe they painted it, maybe the aliens carved it out of their alien Beryllium, maybe it’s Maybelline, but there’s no way nature can make that. Which seems more plausible to you: that the earth naturally created a immensely deep canyon that stretches as far as the eye can see, or that THE MAN placed some kind of an optical illusion just out of reach to trick us all into thinking that our land is marvelously beautiful? See for yourself and decide:
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Petrified Forest surprised me. I know all National Parks are beautiful, or else why make that land a National Park? But after seeing Yosemite and Sequoia in the week before we hit Petrified Forest, I kind of expected it to be underwhelming. It wasn't. It was actually kind of a perfect park to wind our trip to an end. When we started our trip to California, we weren't even planning on stopping at Petrified Forest. But when we were calculating which route we should take home at the end of our trip, we realized we couldn't not stop there. We would be driving right through it. Since we added it to our itinerary rather spontaneously, we didn't even have a full day to see the park. Just a couple hours. Once I was there, I was disappointed that we didn't have more time to spend, because it seemed like if you had a whole day to dedicate to it, you could see the whole park. We didn't get to stop at every trail and landmark, but we hit a few of the big ones. We entered from the South end of the park, so the first place we went was the Rainbow Forest Museum, which had the Giant Logs trail essentially in its backyard. I'd seen petrified wood before when I was traveling through South Dakota, but either I had forgotten just how colorful it can be, or the petrified wood I'd seen then just wasn't as vibrant as what was in Petrified Forest. Basically, these fallen trees are full of color because of the petrifying process, which, believe it or not, is very different than what Hermione experienced in Chamber of Secrets. There's no Basilisk involved, rather these trees get trapped underwater and over the course of millions of years, the wood is replaced by minerals like silica and quartz. So even though the "trees" we were seeing looked just like normal fallen trees from a distance, they are actually no longer made of wood at all.
![]() Our next stop was the Puerco Pueblo. Going into this park, I thought it was just going to be a bunch of petrified wood, but the Puerco Pueblo is actually a former home of the ancestral Puebloan people. People lived in this settlement between A.D. 1250 and A.D. 1380. The structures that we were looking at used to have over 100 rooms, which was pretty cool to imagine when we were seeing only a fraction of it. What impressed me most, though, was a specific petroglyph. There was a marking on one if the rocks that marked the summer solstice exactly. It was painted on a rock in front of another rock formation that had a crack in the middle. Ever summer solstice, the sunlight beams through the crack and hits the mark exactly. Pretty impressive. The last place we went was the Painted Desert Inn National Historic Landmark. It was a beautiful building with stunning views, and when we were in there, a few demonstrators were giving a pretty cool presentation about weaving blankets and rugs. They even showed us how yarn is made from wool for that specific art form. The Painted Desert Inn was a beautiful place to end our time in Petrified Forest and to end our California trip.
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About the blog.I started this blog in 2017 with the goal of seeing all the U.S. National Parks and writing about them. But as I kept writing and posting, I realized there's so much more I want to document in my life. So, the blog grew into something much broader and even more special to my heart. Archives.
January 2022
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