Tucked away in a remote corner of the Colorado Plateau is a curious and often overlooked park known as the Petrified Forest. 24 miles east of the sleepy and sun-scorched town of Holbrook Arizona, a barren scrubland gives way to colorful badlands. Eroding clay hills painted in muted tones of almond, wine, coral pink, and lavender. Among these furrowed slopes is the largest concentration of petrified wood in the world, trees which lived and died over 200 million years ago, they were submerged in a swamp and buried in volcanic ash. Over time, cell by cell these logs were replaced with quartz and other colorful minerals. Preserved in form, these ancient trees sit like giant paper weights on the eroding bentonite clays which slowly deflate and wear away beneath them.
While I'd long been aware of this place, I was never motivated enough to stop and check it out. My first experience in this place was in May. My friend Charles asked me if I wanted to go backpacking at Petrified, I said 'why not?'..... plus I could probably pay for gas and food by writing a review of the trip for Outdoor Project.
We left from Flagstaff in the mid afternoon and arrived in Petrified forest in just under an hour and a half. The light was still harsh when we arrived, and the wind was picking the desert clean (while simultaneously depositing sand into the spaces between my teeth). Everything that wasn't tied down was being blown to Mexico. We stopped at the visitors center, and after being interrogated, providing our shoe sizes (I can only guess what the girl at the front desk wanted to know that for), and swearing a blood oath not to take any petrified wood, we were given a permit. We were told that we had to be at the trailhead before 7:00pm and were not to exit the trailhead before 7:00am. We were warned that the gates would be locked behind us at dusk, and that attempts to steal petrified wood and escape under the cover of darkness would be futile.
We set out from the painted desert inn, a charming relic of old Route-66. The inn was constructed in 1937 from pieces of petrified wood quarried, carried and laid by the young men of the Civilian Conservation Corps during the great depression. The building was later remodeled by famed architect Mary Jane Coulter, who gave it a faux adobe facade and adorned it with hand painted stained glass and beams of ponderosa pine from the white mountains. The interior walls were painted to reflect the art of indigenous cultures in the southwest. The building, a clear example of the pueblo revival style, is perched on a basalt flow overlooking the painted desert. I know of few other structures with such a lovely view. The soft lines of the building compliment the surrounding hills, the facade takes on hues ranging from bright pink to tangerine depending on the light. The building feels as if it belongs here and gives one the impression that that it grew right out of the ground, rather than having been crafted by human hands.
As the sun sank lower in the sky we began our descent from the basalt bench. We quickly left the pinyon-juniper vegetation behind and sank into the bizarre and colorful painted desert . As the sun drifted lower, the landscape took on a completely different character, cumulus clouds climbed in the east. Dull whites and browns became brilliant oranges and deep blues. We wandered through lithodendron wash (rock-tree wash), a large sandy riverbed studded with 217 million year old logs weighing as much as Volkswagons. As we traversed across the trackless desert, we stopped at a conspicuous pile of rocks. Desert varnish covered the vertical faces of these large rocks and carved into the patina was markings from 600 or perhaps 2000 years ago.
We found a side canyon to lithodendron wash and followed it until we reached a field of petrified wood exploding out of each rill and gully in every hillside. We watched the sun set as the clouds in the east attempted to dump their contents. But the air was too dry, the water just hung in the air and disappeared, each drop being absorbed by the desert air. Between the curtains of virga on one side and the last rays of sunlight on the other, a rainbow split the sky in two. We shared this view with no one, except a few desert hares. We sat on a triassic log the size of a small redwood and watched the light slowly fade contemplating how hard it would be to catch one of those jackrabbits.
The night was warm, and the wind slowly died down, by 2:00am the air was perfectly still and all was quiet, save the distant song of some coyotes. I woke to the crescent moon hanging low in the sky, there was just enough light to make out the silhouettes of giant logs splayed out bare under the multitudes of stars.
I was hooked, I came back again in June. This time I hiked the southern unit with my friend Danny. We got there at sunset, drank a few beers, and stumbled into the darkness to find a flat piece of ground to lay our sleeping bags on. No coyote songs that night, but we kept busy telling stories late into the darkness, the smell of sage hung in the air. In the morning, we retraced our steps and found some potshards and pieces of chert, perhaps the fragments of ancient tools.
Weeks later, an opportunity to work in the park fell into my lap. I was tasked with leading a crew in a revegetation project. It might sound like some really relaxing and fun work, but really we just spent 80 hours in the sun, raking seeds into the stubborn and unyielding clay in a strip 30 feet wide and 6 miles long. The 100 degree heat made the work intolerable, but 7 days of sunrises and sunsets in this landscape made it worthwhile. Each afternoon we would watch the clear blue sky populate with herds of clouds stretching miles high. The monsoons were here, and each day they would move in from the east around 3:00pm, first some gusts of wind then that smell. The smell my friend Emily called "petrichor", the sweet fragrance that accompanies the wetting of parched desert soils. A smell, which to me, is rivaled only by juniper smoke and the scent of wet creosote. Curtains of water would douse small patches of the desert filling the washes with pale green water. Thunder and lightning echo and roll across the valleys and broken hills, dust devils rose thousands of feet into the air.
No one thing in this park stands out, its beauty is subtle, you have to work for it, you have to wait for it. One moment it will be harsh and cruel, and in the next moment its mood will change. The wilderness areas here have no trails, and that provides a rare opportunity to wander without purpose or direction. It allows you to get in touch with your senses and follow your gut. It allows you to discover something new. Each day new things erode out of the hillsides, each rainy season deepens the washes and excavates bones of creatures that lived, walked, flew, and copulated around 220 million years before this very moment. Needless to say, I will be back soon....and I will bring more friends and plenty of whiskey.