Enid at painted desert, Petrified Forest National Park
There was a wicked storm last night, sometime around midnight. It rained a bit and there was some thunder, but mostly it was just a lot of wind. When we awoke this morning the sky was still partly overcast, but clearing. It was quite chilly, but not too windy, so we drove to Petrified Forest National Park, and spent the day there. It was pretty cold, and we wore our toques and gloves (and Enid her long underwear), but the trip to the park was well worth it.
We started at the north end of the park and drove through the painted desert. We stopped at the historic site, the Painted Desert Inn, which was rebuilt in the 1930’s by the Civilian Conservation Core. Now it is a museum with a lot of the original furnishings and paintings on the walls.
We ate our lunch in the Tahoe looking out over the painted desert. Then we continued on to Puerco Pueblo, an archaeological site where there are the ruins of a settlement from several hundred years ago. There were a large number of petroglyphs here, as well as more at a site not too far away called Newspaper Rock. At this latter site there is a solar calendar, where a crack in the rock lets through a shaft of light which exactly aligns with an image of the sun on the day of the summer solstice.
Petrified trees at Jasper Forest, Petrified Forest National Park
The southern part of the park is littered with thousands of pieces of beautifully coloured petrified wood. Not just small pieces, there are many complete trees, as big as those that make up the modern coastal rainforest in British Columbia. We first saw the logs at Blue Mesa, then saw even more on the ground at Jasper Forest. At Crystal Forest we walked for over a mile around a loop trail through the petrified trees. There were an incredible number of logs, but the wind made it extremely cold, especially on the way back. It was so strong that it was hard to walk both with and against the wind.
Enid on trail at Crystal Forest, Petrified Forest National Park
Finally we stopped at the Rainbow Forest Museum where the largest of the logs is located. By now we were cold, and pretty well saturated with views of the trees, so we didn’t stay long before driving back to Holbrook. It’s a good thing that it was so pretty in the national park, as the weather certainly didn’t make the day!