Painted, petrified and pummeled!

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Painted, petrified and pummeled!

HOLBROOK, AZ – Clouds and a forecast of possible rain greeted us this morning, along with a breeze and cooler temperature. I dug out my rain jacket from the depths of the closet, where it has sat unused for weeks, just in case.

Our destination today was the Petrified Forest National Park, about 25 miles from town, but we stopped first to see the Holbrook museum and collect some local literature. In exchange for a donation toward the museum, we were each allowed to select a small piece of petrified wood to take home.

How does a piece of wood turn to stone? That was the question we hoped to have answered at the park. We entered from the south end and stopped at the Rainbow Forest Museum, where the ranger invited us to watch a short film.

Before the continents had drifted apart, we learned, the land that is now Arizona was very close to, and similar in appearance to the rainforest of the Panama region – lush vegetation with towering trees and high humidity. The continents drifted, and in the Triassic period, about 225 million years ago, the forest toppled on what had become a flood plain. The logs became mired in volcanic ash, mud and heavy silt, and silica-laden water infiltrated the cells of the wood, encasing them with minerals. The silica crystallized into quartz, preserving the logs forever. Depending on what was in the minerals, the logs took on a variety of colours.

The petrified trees were a big curiosity in the early 1900s, and unfortunately visitors took a lot of fine specimens away as souvenirs. (They must have been fairly small ones, because the logs are extremely heavy!)

To preserve this especially rich collection, the region was declared a national monument in 1906. A large tract of the painted desert was added to it in 1932, and in 1962 the area was made into a national park.

We walked around the looped path behind the Rainbow Forest Museum to see some of the petrified logs, randomly strewn on the hillsides, sometimes in a column as if the tree had just fallen. Colours of purple, orange, yellow and red outlined the ancient rings in amazing patterns, and even though they were made of stone, you could still see the roughness of the original bark, and twisted knotholes.

Clouds had gathered in the huge sky overhead and a stiff breeze had started to blow, but we braved the wind, for a while anyway, while we ate our picnic lunch at the tables provided nearby. Then we headed through the park with its rolling hills and mesas. These were striped in grey, purple, rusty red and white, living up to the name they were given by early Spanish explorers, who called the area “el desierto pintado”.

Newspaper Rock, about half-way through the park, was a collection of huge stones that had tumbled down a cliffside, where pre-historic natives had pounded petroglyphs of people, animals and designs onto the dark, flat surfaces. The film we had seen showed one spiral sun design that was a calendar; a beam of sunlight would come between a cleft of rocks and hit the centre of the sun at the exact time when crop-planting should begin.

We looked at the ruins of an ancient pueblo village, with more petroglyphs (including one that looked just like the stork bringing a baby!), and stopped at several lookout points with breathtaking views of striped cliffs and hills, the immense flat yellow-grassed prairie beyond, and blue mountains on the horizon, all crowned with heavy grey clouds that spilled a few raindrops on us before we headed home. I hardly needed the jacket, but at least I had it handy.

Dozens of tumbleweed balls hopped and rolled across the highway as we drove back to camp, and the air was brown with dust as the wind gusted across the flat plain and pummeled the sides of the truck. It was fun to see trucks and cars smash the dry balls into twigs as they passed.