From the Archives: Petrified Forest National Park

I was looking through my photos from this year to pick out a few highlights to share (coming soon, I hope), when I realized that I never shared my photos from Petrified Forest National Park! And it really deserves its own post. So here, from the archives, are a few sights from Arizona's least well known National Park, Petrified Forest. It's really worth a visit, especially if you enjoy visually stunning geology!

We started at the north entrance of the park, with views of the Painted Desert.

Then we headed south through the park to some of the archeological sites, including Puerco Pueblo. 

This site has over 100 rooms and is thought to have housed over 200 people at its height in about 1300.

Nearby are a variety of petroglyphs. The zoomorphic ones are always my favorites (big surprise).

But there's a beautiful variety.

Just a little further south, there's a stunning set of over 650 petroglyphs on what has come to be known as "Newspaper Rock".

What about the petrified forest, you may be wondering? We're getting there. Driving south, the landscape starts changing. Erosion of the badlands has made the bright purple and bluish-gray stripes of the Chinle Formation visible, including in the so-called "Teepees".

If you look carefully here, there's quite a bit of petrified wood in this scene, but you'll see much more soon.

We decided to walk the Blue Mesa loop, and were very glad we did! (The beginning and end is a little steep, but then it flattens out, and it's absolutely gorgeous.)

Most of the brown in the photo above is actually petrified wood that has been channeled wherever water flows.

The blue and purple banding is gorgeous and unique. I won't admit just how many photos I took trying to capture it, and I still didn't quite.

And finally, here's some of the actual petrified wood. These were formed during the Late Triassic, when fallen trees were buried by volcanic ash and over time, silica from the ash crystalized, replacing the wood with quartz.

A few of these trees are still relatively intact, such as the one forming Agate Bridge:

But most of them have splintered into thousands of fragments, which cover large portions of the landscape.

Zooming in...

Some of the petrified wood is extraordinarily colorful.

And some pieces even include crystallized cavities that resemble geodes.

Petrified logs are everywhere...

And everything that looks like wood chips is basically petrified wood chips!

Some trunks are still in place but have fractured through natural processes, although it looks almost as if someone had taken a chain saw to them for firewood.

Here's a last look at the colorful veins and the organic structure that is both recapitulated and transformed by the crystalization process.

And here's a complete cross-section of one of the larger, colorful pieces.

There was also some interesting flora and fauna, including a horned lark, but of course the geology was truly stunning. I hope you enjoyed the photos and consider a trip out there yourself sometime!