Painted Desert & Petrified Forest

Thursday...May 12...Another move day.  A short I-40 East drive brought us to a campground outside Holbrook, AZ.  After a quick set-up we headed out for the Painted Desert & Petrified Forest.  This is a tapestry of time with countless colors, hues, and shades that stretch as far as the eye can see...shaped by wind and water.

Those stumps to left are petrified wood.

What is petrified wood?  This is Greek meaning "rock" or "stone" or "wood turned into stone".

 Holbrook is home of the Hashknife Pony Express depicted in the mural above.

As we drove along there was Geronimo's tepee up on the hill.

                                        We passed by Meteor City Trading Post (below).

Located in Navajo and Apache counties of AZ, this was a winding 28 mile drive with an average elevation of 5,400 feet.

This park is noted for its fallen trees from the Late Triassic Period...about 225 million years ago.

The Painted Desert is a desert of badlands in the Four Corners area that runs into the Petrified Forest Ntaional Park.  It gets its name from the Chinle Formation and has varied colors with the common red and shades of lavender.





Our first stop was the Visitor's Center for info and patches to add to my growing collection.

Our drive stops were as follows...

1.  Tipani Point...where the colors began.

2.  Tawa Point...a pinyon-juniper shrubland atop volcanic rock.

3.  Painted Desert Inn and Pilot Rock...

4.  Chinde Point...

5.  Pintado Point...what looks like a light colored road is a dry wash.

6.  Nizhoni Point...means beautiful in Navajo.

7.  Whipple Point...

8.  Lacey Point...

9.  Route 66 Alignment with a 1932 Studebaker where Historic Route 66 once cut through the park.

10.  Puerco Pueblo with ancestral Puebloan homes.

As we pulled into our next viewing area, we were greeted by a Raven.






11.  Newspaper Rock...displays over 650 petroglyphs...some over 2000 years old.  What is a petroglyph?  it is a drawing or carving on rock made by prehistoric people.

12.  The Tepees...

The layers of color are awesome.

Petrified rocks.......

Petrified rocks and logs.







The rock (below right) looks like the head of a bird with beak and eye.

13.  Blue Mesa...the badlands with colorful petrified wood.  If these hills could talk the brown/yellow sandstone layers were deposited in the river channel.  The blue/red mudstone layers were laid down in the rivers floodplain.  The white ash layers record volcanic eruptions in the area. Fossilized trees and plants show that this was once a tropical environment.

14.  Agate Bridge (below) is a 110 foot long petrified log bridge.

15.  Jasper Forest and Crystal Forests have high concentrations of petrified wood.

16.  The Flattops...

Dessert on our way back to our fifth wheel was a photo shoot of a Pronghorn Antelope family grazing in a roadside field.  Look for the little fawn.  Two does, a buck, and fawn.  Awesome!

Until next time...take care...be safe...see you by the campfire.