Desert West Region

We made two half-day trips to the Petrified Forest National Park in early November 2023 while staying at the Holbrook/Petrified Forest KOA Journey RV Park, about a half-hour drive from both the south and north park entrances. The Petrified Forest National Park stretches north and south between Interstate 40 and Highway 180. There are two entrances into the park, each one with a visitor center. The petrified log fields are found at the southern end of the park. Outlooks, trails, cultural sites, and painted desert badlands are found in the middle and northern sections.

During both of our visits we drove the full length of the park, southbound on the first trip, and northbound the second time. We stopped at some different overlooks and points of interest each day.

The Painted Desert has a very unique, other-worldly, landscape with colored bands running horizontally through its rolling hills. The colorful Painted Desert badlands are composed of bentonite, a product of altered volcanic ash. The clay minerals in the bentonite can absorb water and swell much as eight times their dry volume. The expansion and contraction properties of the bentonite cause rapid erosion including by preventing much vegetation from growing on—and thus fixing—the slopes of the hills.

There were also views of spectacular mesas and buttes along the park road. Their flat tops are created by the presence of cap rocks, more erosion-resistant rock such as sandstone over softer clays. The softer rock is protected by the cap stones, but, as the sides weather and the protective rock falls down, the softer rock erodes away as it is exposed to the elements. Without the capstone, the feature becomes another rolling badland. Mesas typically are wider than they are tall while buttes are taller than they are wide. Towers, monuments, and hoodoos are even further eroded features.

The petrified trees that lie strewn throughout the southern sections of the park are an amazing sight. Initially, looking out over the fields of petrified logs, you might think you are looking at the remnants of recently felled trees, but then you realize that these are actually fossilized trees that are some 200 million years old, and there is a sense that time has stood still in these areas. The quartz within the petrified wood is hard and brittle, fracturing easily when subjected to stress. It is thought that during the gradual uplifting of the Colorado Plateau, starting 60 million years ago, the still buried petrified trees were under so much stress they broke like glass rods. The crystal nature of the quartz created clean fractures, evenly spaced along the tree trunk, giving the appearance today of logs cut with a chainsaw.

Towards the north end of the park, we visited the cultural site of the Puerco Pueblo. A 0.3-mile paved walk winds through the remains of a hundred room pueblo, occupied by the ancestral Puebloan people over 600 years ago. We were able to see Petroglyphs along the south end of the trail, that are still clear and well defined hundreds of years after they were created.

Probably our favorite spot in the park was the Blue Mesa trail, a 1-mile loop descending from the mesa through the hills of the Painted Desert badlands. The loop trail offers the unique experience of hiking among badland hills of bluish bentonite clay as well as petrified wood. We wandered among the hills and petrified logs and were again struck by the timeless quality of the area.

We were able to take the dogs with us on the Giant Logs trail, a 0.4-mile loop behind Rainbow Forest Museum towards the south end of the park. The trail winds around some of the largest and most colorful logs in the park. “Old Faithful”, at the top of the trail, is almost ten feet wide at the base!

Photos of our visit are provided below. Click on the thumbnails to view the photos.