Most photogenic day so far. After a nice breakfast on Route 66, it was a short drive to the Petrified Forest National Park. It’s a big park, with one road going almost 30 miles through it from end to end, and somehow Rosie knew the exact perfect spot to go. We parked at an innocuous pulloff and followed a folk trail two miles into — and onto — the mesas. It felt like everyone else was doing it wrong. Georgia loved it. We think now that she may be part mountain goat.
If you’ve ever cut and split wood, this would have looked familiar to you. The ground is littered with segments of fossilized tree trunk that look just like what you’d chop off with a chainsaw, and all around are little shards of rock reminiscent of mulch. I spent some time puzzling over why, since the trees were obviously not cut with a chainsaw when they began to petrify millions of years ago.
The segments seem like mineral cleavage, a thing I don’t understand very well. But for whatever reason, the crystal structure in the stone favors long horizontal planes that means the trunk can separate horizontally more easily than vertically. As for why it does: it seems that sometime the sediment surrounding the tree erodes lengthwise, so to speak, exposing the ancient trunk to gravity one vertical segment at a time. When the undercut reaches a cleavage line, another chunk of rock falls to the ground. When it hits the pile, splinters shatter off its edges like bark.
When erosion happens ‘widthwise’, the whole tree remains vaulted over the landscape.
They make it clear at the gate that it’s a crime to take any of the fossils, but I’m still surprised how many small, beautiful, easily-stealable pieces still lay around. Credit that partly to the Curse I guess. Anyway, we didn’t take any either.
The park is more than just petrified wood laying around, and we did a short driving tour of the rest of it. The Blue Mesas were particularly photogenic.
And then we drove to the grand Canyon. First we had to navigate a controlled burn fire, but then…
It deserves its reputation.
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