Trees of Stone

27 Jan 2025

Westward bound at last, we said farewell to the last of the windmills we'd see, as crossing the New Mexico border meant an abrupt end to the forest of windmills. We're still not sure what about Texas makes for such vast ranches of windmills, but if feels like they grow almost as many windmills as cattle.

We crossed New Mexico without much to see. It's the most sparsely populated part of the route thus far. All the way to the next stop was just a series of small towns and the occasional landmark. We did find some cool bridges with artwork on them, so of course those were photographed.

Welcome to Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona!

Petrified Forest is mostly a quirk of geologic formation, but on the surface instead of below like Mammoth Cave. We got there pretty late in the day, so we didn't have time to visit the Museum or Inn, but we could see everything outside, which was most things. The start of the tour overlooked the painted desert, where erosion had exposed many colors of stone that had been deposited over millenia.

There's also an inn that was constructed in 1920, and was rebuilt in the 1990s to shore up the foundation and give it the final look it has today. There's a self-guided tour inside, but we didn't have a chance to go do it, preferring to head toward the woods.

The Petrified Forest National Park also has a length of the original Route 66 in it, though at this point, the route itself isn't visible at all except a few power poles. The Park Service set up a little monument for it to commemorate the historic route.

Down the park road we encountered our first log in the forest, the Agate Gap. The bridge has two layers at this point, the top one being the petrified wood log with a concrete buttress below it to prevent the log from falling down. This is as close as we could get though.

We carried on, hunting for an opportunity to really get into the forest, but all we had found was a single downed log at Jasper Forest.

It was very interesting though. Apparently millions of years ago these mineralized logs were once actual trees and the whole area was swampland. The trees were felled and trapped deep in the mud where bacteria and fungus couldn't break them down. Over millions of years the trees' cells were replaced by the silica in the mud, making crystal structures in the exact shape of the original tree.

Cory was very excited to point out a chunk of petrified wood.

The Jasper Forest has an overlook as well were you can see a huge conglomeration of fallen trees. The petrified logs are slowly unburied through erosion of the surrounding rocks and so crack and tumble down the hill as they can't support their weight.

We found an even bigger forest a little further down the road with a 3/4 mile walk through the forest. The forest did kinda fall down on the job though.

We continued into the evening from the park to our hotel for the cold night. On the way we saw the city of Holbrook sign that was next to a super-fun statue where they tried to get the trees to stand back up.