Nature's Palette: Unveiling Arizona's Petrified Forest

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In eastern Arizona, rolling hills and mesas and buttes sculpt the landscape in a dizzying array of colors that look as though they are artificially painted on. The red bleeds into pink and maroon, orange mingles with rust, and is ribboned in places by white volcanic ash. Spiky yuccas add sharp angles to the curvature of the landscape. This is, in fact, called the Painted Desert, the northern section of Petrified Forest National Park. Iron, manganese, and aluminum oxide sediments in the soil cause the brilliant reds and pinks and oranges that give the Painted Desert its name.

The heavier the concentration, the more brilliant the colors. You won't find petrified wood in the Painted Desert, however, except at the visitor center, where a few logs are on display and small pieces from outside the protected area of the park can be purchased. Petrified Forest National Park is comprised of two very distinct areas. In the north, the Painted Desert provides view, after spectacular view, of lush red and white hills, green mesas and plateaus, and the scrubby kinds of plants expected in an arid zone. The geology changes on the road south through the Blue Mesa, with its striations of color punctuated by blue bentonite clay, diminishing foliage, and the first glimpses of petrified logs scattered throughout the Badlands.

From the rich, warm hues of the Painted Desert's embrace to the eerie, otherworldly environment of the Petrified Forest, the park transits the entire color spectrum. Red, orange, yellow-green, blue, violet, black and white as well. It's a visual cornucopia, an entire artist's palette painting the shapes, contours and textures of this remarkable park, from the macro view of the seemingly endless Painted Desert landscape to the micro view of a single disk of petrified wood.

I'm Jason Epperson, and this is the America's National Parks Podcast.

On the outside, the petrified trees, which often lie in fairly uniform-sized logs throughout the park, don't look that strikingly different from modern-day trees. fallen on the forest floor. The texture of bark remains. The color can be brownish, perhaps with some hint of other colors, but even today's dead trees carry smatterings of color from fungus and moss and lichen. It's not until you catch a glimpse of the inside of the petrified wood, easily visible at either end of a petrified log, that you realize these logs are made of stone.

Wildly brilliant colored stone, like slabs of gems glinting in the sunlight. A thousand questions flood your mind. How does the wood turn into stone? What are the colors from? Why does the wood feel satin, smooth?

Where did petrified wood come from if there are no forests here, just vast stretches of ashen badlands sliced by silty ribbons of water? The deposits of petrified trees in the park are the result of ancient trees washed downstream in a large river system after they died and fell. Many of these trees were very large, over 200 feet tall. As the trees floated downstream, they created natural log jams, resulting in the clusters found in the park today. The original forests weren't necessarily located in this exact spot.

These trees are very old, over 200 million years old, older by far than the T. rex era in the Triassic period. Although a tree can start to petrify in a mere few decades, it takes thousands of years for the process to complete and for the wood to be fully replaced by stone. The trees, which were largely conifers, but also some ginkgos, had completely crystallized by the time the T. rex came along.

The actual molecular structure of the wood changes during petrification. When a fallen tree is covered by sediment, whether from river water or volcanic ash, the organic matter that composes the wood is replaced very slowly by silica found in the settlement, as the rest is dissolved by flowing groundwater. The silica filled in the cavities of the tree and ultimately the cells and hardened into quartz as it dried. Most of the silica contained mineral contamination or impurities that infiltrated the wood, along with the silica itself. Each type of mineral accounts for different colors.

in the petrified wood. Iron oxide creates red, orange, yellow, and purple. Manganese results in black and gray. Carbon also makes black. Chromium, rarer than the others, creates green petrified wood.

Pure quartz, without mineral contamination, remains white.

The complete petrification process transforms the structure of wood into crystalline quartz. The structure or shape of the tree is preserved, but the chemical composition has changed. The tree is now a fossil and is nearly as hard as a diamond. The brittleness of crystalline quartz causes the petrified trees to break along fairly straight lines, looking almost as if they had been cut by a saw. The logs cracked along these stress lines caused by gravity and ice wedges.

The nature of this silica composition causes a clean edge break. Now, with so many trees over the course of Earth's history, it would seem that there should be a lot of petrified forests all over the world. But the truth is, petrified wood is quite rare. A unique combination of circumstances must all come together in the same place and time to create petrified wood.

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what sets petrified wood apart from other fossils, or from other forms of dead tree decay? Hardness, color, texture, weight, and age.

Petrified wood is so hard that it can be cut and polished, and resists scratching. The colors are vibrant and vary from logs that are fairly consistent color throughout, for example, a largely uniform mustard-colored surface or a rust-colored surface, to single logs that contain all the colors in an array of intricate patterns and unique designs. The texture of petrified wood is determined by the type of tree, the type of minerals, and the conditions under which it was petrified, such as volcanic versus river sediment, or the speed of the flowing groundwater. Petrified wood is very heavy, much heavier than organic wood. On a trail where thousands of petrified logs lay scattered near and far, the temptation to examine every single one is strong.

At Petrified Forest, many lie immediately alongside the paved pathways, close enough to study the color variations, both bold and subtle, close enough to touch the cold, smooth face of the fossilized wood. While all national parks have a take-nothing-but-memories policy, meaning you can't collect and remove things you find in a national park, right down to seashells and pine cones, the penalties surrounding removal of petrified wood from the park are severe, starting at a minimum fine of $325..

The park preserves the unique geological history of the Petrified Forest. There are very few deposits of petrified wood in the world, and this collection in Arizona is one of the largest and most colorful. The park also preserves the unique biodiversity of the region and the cultural heritage of human history. The first evidence of human history in the park dates back over 13,000 years to the Paleo-Indian culture, followed by the Archaic period, basket makers, and Puebloans. As harsh as the environment seems today, in ancient times, the land was more fertile due to higher rainfall, and it was resource-rich.

The park contains the remnants of an ancient Native American Pueblo and petroglyphs, including a great concentration of petroglyphs on a boulder called Newspaper Rock.

Over 200 square miles in area, Petrified Forest National Park offers a wide variety of remarkable adventures, from hiking to backpacking, to horseback riding to geocaching, all amidst the breathtaking, colorful landscape that serves as the backdrop to this park. The trails meander through the rolling hills of the Painted Desert and past a dazzling array of petrified wood logs. Erosion creates the varied land formations in the park, mesas, buttes, and rolling badlands, towers, monuments, and hoodoos. Although the term Painted Desert applies to part of the park, as a whole, the park is mostly short grass, prairie or intermountain basin, semi-arid grassland, and plays a host to a wide variety of trees and shrubs, wildflowers and cactus, blossoms, grasses, mosses, and lichen. The park is home to many species of animals, amphibians, birds, insects, spiders, mammals, and reptiles.

Be aware that the park is home to the prairie rattlesnake, so watch where you step and put your hands. The visitor centers, one at each end of the park, offer films, exhibits, samples of petrified logs, and bookstores and gift shops. The park also has a collection of fossils found on location from the Triassic period, 200 million years ago. The Painted Desert Visitor Center includes a museum demonstration lab where guests can see paleontologists prepare fossils by removing all of the rocks surrounding the fossil, stabilizing it so it can be put on display. Within the boundaries of the park, 11 sites have been named to the National Register of Historic Places, including buildings, Native American ruins, and historic routes.

It's the only national park to contain a portion of historic Route 66.

. And if you take the Route 66 journey through eastern Arizona, you can drive right through the park on the main road, come out on the other side, and resume your trip. Even if you don't have time to stop, it's worth the drive for the views.

Petrified Forest National Park is open every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas. However, unlike many other national parks, Petrified Forest is not open around the clock. That's to protect from theft. Hours are limited to daylight. A visit can stand on its own or be combined with other National Park Service sites.

Two hours west of the park lies a cluster of smaller but spectacular national park sites just outside of Flagstaff, Arizona. Montezuma Castle National Monument is a 20-room high-rise cliff dwelling. Sunset Crater National Monument is the site of the most recent volcanic eruption in Arizona, occurring about a thousand years ago. Tootsie Goot National Monument is a thousand-year-old hilltop Pueblo village. Walnut Canyon National Monument preserves the epic canyon itself, along with ruins of cliff dwellings along the canyon walls.

And of course, there's a big old canyon called the Grand Canyon that lies just north of Flagstaff. About two hours to the east lie a pair of parks over the New Mexico border. El Moro National Monument preserves a sandstone bluff where ancestral Puebloans, Spanish and American travelers, carved signatures, dates, messages, and petroglyphs. El Mapayis National Monument is the site of a volcanic landscape that includes lava flows, cinder cones, lava tube caves, and sandstone bluffs.

This episode of America's National Parks was written by Lauren Eisenberg Davis, and I'm your host, Jason Epperson. If you enjoyed the show, please consider leaving us a rating and a review. If you're new here, make sure to subscribe to the podcast to get new episodes delivered to your feed. If you're looking for photos and tips about visiting national parks, check out our America's National Parks Facebook group. And if you're interested in RV travel, we hope you'll also check out our RV Miles podcast and YouTube channel.

Today's show was sponsored by L.

L. Bean. Follow the hashtag BeAnOutsider and visit LLBean.com to find great gear for exploring the national parks. And by Solostove. Use promo code PARKS20OFF to get $20 off your next purchase of $200 or more at Solostove.com.