The Stark Beauty of the Petrified Forest

As my friends and I drove our motorcycles deeper into desert country, broad bands of red and pink became prevalent in the sandstone hills around us. The colors became even more vivid when we approached Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Route 40 passes between high, colorful sandstone formations just east of the city.

The region’s stark beauty became most apparent, however, when we entered Petrified Forest National Park. It’s located just off Route 40 about 30 miles east of Holbrook, Arizona, in the east central portion of the state.

The park, established in 1962, preserves 93,533 acres of arid terrain containing colorful concentrations of petrified wood and archeological treasures. Without such protection, by now, opportunists would have mined and sold the petrified trees and other artifacts as tourist trinkets, thus destroying this window on the ancient world. Park rules prohibit visitors from removing or disturbing pieces of petrified wood, fossils or rocks.

A psychedelic experience.

The park encompasses the psychedelic Painted Desert and Rainbow Forest. Together they include six separate forests containing multicolored badlands and vast mesas that are strewn with fossils, petroglyphs and pueblo ruins.

A trip through the park’s colorful moonscape provides a surreal departure into land rich in cultural, geologic, archeological and spiritual history.

The 28-mile-long road through the park, which includes eight scenic overlooks, gave us a lasting impression of the area.

Adventurous souls who choose to hike through this trailless wilderness can explore less accessible locations containing the ruins of dwellings and rock formations decorated with prehistoric habitants’ drawings and carvings.

We stuck to the scenic drive that took us first through the Painted Desert.

Even though we’d been riding for days through colorful terrain, the Painted Desert’s extremely vibrant coloration immediately impressed us. Wide veins of red, tan, beige, white, black and pink course across the ground. The colors penetrate the tabletop mesas and tepee-like badlands formations that dominate the area. The colors’ intensity and shading, and the land’s visual texture changed as clouds moving across the sky filtered and redirected the sunlight.

It’s not really a desert.

We learned that while the Painted Desert receives only nine inches of annual rainfall, in reality it’s not a desert. It’s a mosaic of plant communities and ecosystems called a shortgrass prairie. The area is technically an “extreme tension zone” that’s not quite a desert or a prairie. Grasses and shrubs have adapted to survive the wind, limited water and soil types found here.

We continued our loop though the park and came to the Rainbow Forest. The trees-turned-to-stone in this area give the Petrified Forest its name.

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