Petrified Forest: more than ancient trees

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.

After the Giant Logs trail, we went to see the Agate Bridge, which was a short stop for us, but I would still say it's worth taking a peek at. Agate Bridge formed basically like any other petrified tree. What makes it special is that after it fossilized, rivers and streams eroded the ground below it, exposing this 110 ft petrified log so it became kind of like a bridge. However, water may likely cause it to collapse as well. In 1917 they built a concrete support under it, but it still may not prevent the inevitable fall.

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.

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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.