Heading east out of Flagstaff was initially intriguing as I was getting to see the Arizona desert landscape for the first time while it wasn’t raining. You get a pretty view of the San Francisco Mountain peak in your rearview mirror for a very long time. However, once that disappears, you’re stuck with miles and miles of desert scrub until you get to Petrified Forest National Park!
There are two main sections of the park which straddle the north and south sides of Interstate 40. The northern section houses the Painted Desert while the southern portion has some ruins, petroglyphs, and of course, the petrified wood. I started with the northern portion as I figured I’d swing down south near Show Low, AZ and try my hand at finding a camping spot in the National Forest.
The Painted Desert is A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. I feel like I will be using the word “amazing” a lot and apologize ahead of time—thesaurus be damned. While the petrified wood is fun to look at and very interesting in concept, the views of the Painted Desert are like Badlands National Park on steroids. If you were a child of the 80s, or a parent of a child of the 80s, you may also be reminded of Land Before Time movies. The place looks so vast and ancient, you can’t help but imagine the time of the dinosaurs. In fact, the Visitor Center would love to tell you all about dinosaurs and from which era each of the striations in the exposed rock came from.
The Petrified Forest section is the aftermath of what happened to a bunch of trees that fell into the water, then were buried, then filled with silica, and finally exposed by the wind about 200 million years ago. Even though you are never supposed to take stuff from National Parks, massive amounts of petrified wood have been taken from the park. I remember visiting the park when I was a child and hearing that at the rate the wood was being taken, the park would lose all its petrified wood by such and such date. Luckily, there is still petrified wood to behold, and if you want some everlasting-harder-than-rock wood, you can buy some legally from people who found it on their own private property.
