Petrified Forest National Park is located in northeastern Arizona, not particularly close to much of anything.  It’s well worth going to see, however.  There’s a single road through the park, about 29 miles long, with only a couple of scenic side loops, so getting lost while in your car is impossible.

The northern area of the part contains the Painted Desert, and the colored layers of the rock are really beautiful.

It seems to me that I’ve seen other painted deserts, and they never fail to impress.

Located on the rim overlooking the area is the Painted Desert Inn, built in the early 1920s from a locally available material — petrified wood.  The building looks quite different now, however, with a rendered façade.

The inside has been kept very much as it was, although the inn is no longer operational, so no food or drinks are served.

It was purchased by the National Park Service in 1936 and was greatly restored by the CCC.

All that is very nice, but I really came to the park to see the petrified forest, so I moved on.  Down the road I came across this 1932 Studebaker quietly decaying at the side of the road.  A sign nearby said that the original Route 66 ran through this part of the desert as a dirt road.

Things decay so slowly in the desert, that this car will probably still be here for decades to come.  Looking inside, you can see the wooden frame still in reasonable condition.

Although this was interesting, it still wasn’t petrified trees, so I moved on.  Only to stop at an Indian pueblo ruin site, where I walked around for a while, learning about the people who lived here.

And I moved on.  Only to stop at a place called Newspaper Rock to see the petroglyphs carved in the rock there.  The rock was at a distance, so the second picture is taken though my binoculars in an attempt to capture some details.

Still on a quest to find the petrified trees that give the park it’s name, I took a side loop and explored the Blue Mesa.  As in the Painted Desert area, the colors in the landscape were beautiful.

You can see that there’s a path winding along the bottom of the mesa.  This descends from the cliff above, and I was tempted to take it, but I felt taht I was still recovering from my experience with heat in Big Bend NP, so decided not to risk a repeat adventure.

Ok, now the next stopping point on the road was called Jasper Petrified Forest.  There just had to be petrified trees here, right.

Yup.  It was worth waiting for.

The ranger had told me about a path I could take from the parking area down to the plain below.  Unlike many parks, he said that I was very welcome to pick up the rocks, move them, look at them, but them put them back.  There was no particular trail, so I was free to wander anywhere I wanted on the plain.

There were only a few other people wandering the plain at the time I was there, but I’d highly recommend it to anyone who’s planning to go there.  This place was just incredible.

It’s really stunning when you learn, as I did from a ranger, that this forest dates from the Triassic Period, about 200 million years ago.

The log rocks came in all sizes, but this is one of the biggest I found on the plain. (With my foot for scale.)

You can see how the elements are still eating away at the landscape, and yet they seem to have little effect on the log rocks themselves.  But looking at the ground, I realized that all those little pebbles were also pieces of petrified wood.

I noticed that some of the shards were very sharp, and looked liked they could have been used in place of flint.  I never heard that that was the case, however.

When I started looking more closely at the small shards, I began noticing the variety of colors.  No doubt these are caused by different elements trapping in the rock.  There were surprising sulfur yellows…

All shades of purple…

Deep blood reds…

There were lots of greys and blues, and some rocks, like this one, even contained geodes.

I found this chalky white interesting, although there didn’t seem to be much of it.  It looked almost like dolomite.

There were even rich blacks that looked like coal, and plenty of orange running though everything.

Most stunning of all for me was finding a single rock with a variety of colors.  It was amazing that this could be formed naturally.

Although I carried water with me, it was getting hot again by this time, and I felt the need to get back to the coolness of the truck.  I was reluctant to leave this place with so many areas still unexplored, so many rocks still unturned.  Looking down from above, you can see all the little lumps of petrified wood scattered around.  This was only a small portion of the forested area.

The final stop at the southern end of the park was the museum, where they had samples of some of the fossils found in the area.  This is an aetosaur, with some awesome back protection.  The little pterosaur on it’s back had me giggling a bit.

Some of the biggest petrified trees, and certainly the longest ones, were located behind the museum.  The one is the picture below was the largest in the park.  For me, though, all the colors in the Jasper Forest area were the highlight.

As I got ready to leave the park, I discovered that someone had parked next to me.  No matter where you are, if you see another FJ in a parking lot, you have to park next to it.  It seems to be a rule.  I like that rule.