Since the Petrified Forest National Park wasn’t on the list of places we planned to visit, I hadn’t done any research. Sometimes this works out well, because everything is a surprise. For one thing, I didn’t know Arizona’s Painted Desert is within the 150,000 acres which make up the park.
We entered the park on the north end and drove the 28 mile road through the park. Our first treat was the painted desert…
It is hard to give a sense of scale and these pictures don’t do justice to the beauty. We stopped at the Painted Desert Inn and took in the sights…
We stopped at nearly all of the scenic overlooks.
We couldn’t resist stopping where Route 66 used to be…
Another stop was at Newspaper Rock, there are over 650 petroglyphs in the area…
Imagine a time when you wanted to leave a message for another traveler and the only way to do it was to carve it into the rocks using symbols. There is no “dictionary” for the symbols, so we can only guess as to all of their meanings. Another stop was the Puerco Pueblo. The remains of quite a few building mark the place where as many as 200 people might have lived. There are also petroglyphs here…
We were beginning to see more and more pieces of petrified wood…
We were nearly at the end of the 28 mile road when I caught sight of a pronghorn antelope. I had been hoping to see one, but had almost given up. Steve got this shot.
At the south end of the park is another visitor center with a walking trail passing gigantic petrified logs…
What amazed me the most about the logs was the variety of colors…
Have you ever visited the Petrified Forest? The Painted Desert?
