Painted Desert and Petrified Forest National Park

Thirty years ago we visited this park and we remembered standing right by petrified trees and also of viewing the painted desert - would it be as we remembered? The drive to the park took us over 2 hours but we felt that the chance of being this close to see the park in the future was very slim, so what the heck.  Traveled north to Flagstaff then headed eastbound on I 40.  Humphreys Peak, the highest point in Arizona, was snow covered - probably from the couple of nights prior when we got rain, it got snow.

Snow

Painted Desert - vast area

Drove the park road and stopped at almost all the sights.  First up was the Painted Desert.  Very colorful, vast open areas. We wondered how far could we see? Along the way south through the park, we stopped at the Route 66 sign where the famous road that spanned from Chicago to Los Angeles came through.  Without realizing it, we parked the car right in the middle of the old road!

Get your kicks on Route 66!

Petroglyphs

100 room structure housed over 200 people

Over 650 petroglyphs have been recorded in the park and we were able to view at least a dozen of them, dating back over 2000 years. But the wow factor came in when we hiked the Crystal Forest.  The area was once a humid, wet, lush climate with trees and plants and animals such as dinosaurs, giant amphibians living here over 200 million years ago. Floods, volcanos, uplifting of the land, climate change caused the area that was once a tropical environment to now be a grassy arid plain. Over time, wind and water wore away the rock and ash layers and exposed the remains of the downed trees and skeletons of the dinosaurs.  Archaeologists have found remains of peoples from 13,000 years ago.

Looked like someone had a chainsaw - perfect breaks

Trees all over the place

Amazing all the colors

Beautiful fossilized trees - amazing colors and patterns.  Pink, white, blue, black, brown, green, yellow and red are the colors you can see.  These are caused from the iron, carbon, and manganese from the silica saturated water that the trees were buried in.  Amazing.

Trees were enormous!