Winter Road Trip Day 7: Painted Desert & Petrified Forest

This was our first day seeing the major tourist attractions of Arizona. Our destination: Petrified Forest National Park, which also contains the famous Painted Desert.

From the north entrance to the park, we drove through the Painted Desert first.

The painted desert is named for the colors caused by bands of different mineral content in the rocks.

Gynn had a great time using her old 35 mm fully mechanical Argus camera to shoot the scenery.

We stopped at several overlooks with incredible views of the Painted Desert.

Also along this route was the Painted Desert Inn, one of the original Fred Harvey haciendas along the Santa Fe railway.

The inn building has been restored by the National Park Service.

On a nearby trail we spotted this rabbit hiding in the bushes.

We continued on the road, crossing over I-40 to the southern half of the park. We had some more great views of the landscape along the way.

Here is Gynn with "Laradie" (that's what we named our car).

The next stop we made was at Puerco Pueblo, the site of an ancient Anasazi settlement.

These ruins date to about 1250 AD. The settlement originally consisted of a walled community around a plaza. It had over 100 rooms and may have housed 1200 people.

The kiva was the ceremonial pit of the pueblo. It was used in religious ceremonies, believed to involve the connection between the ancentral puebloans and the earth.

Near the pueblo site are rocks with petroglyphs.

Another collection of petroglyphs can be found at nearby Newspaper Rock. Those petroglyphs were too far to photograph without a high-powered zoom lens, but the park provides telescopic viewers to see the carvings.

This display shows some of the variety of symbols found on Newspaper Rock.

We continued on our way and drove by the Tepees, a large rock formation right next to the road.

Here is Laradie parked by the Tepees.

And some more rock formations that we saw on the side trip up to Blue Mesa.

At Blue Mesa, we encountered a pair of very friendly ravens. I'd guess that these two have gotten plenty of handouts from park visitors.

They totally had the begging racket down.

They even  posed for pictures.

Here's one of the ravens posing in front of the scenery.

Blue Mesa also had some awesome rock formations to look at.

The Blue Mesa road is also the first place where we found the most famous feature of the park: Petrified logs.

A new sapling growing next to a petrified log makes for a strange contrast.

We also found cacti growing in this area (and yes, that white stuff is snow!).

Here I am at Blue Mesa.

After leaving Blue Mesa, we visited Agate Bridge, where a petrified log formed a natural bridge over a ravine, the result of the stone around the log being softer and more easily eroded than the log itself. The log was reenforced with concrete early in the history of the park. According to the rangers, such a feature would be left in its natural state if it were discovered today.

Near the south entrance to the park is the Rainbow Forest, the largest concentration of petrified logs in the park.

 Here is Gynn with one of the bigger petrified logs.

 This was our most prolific day so far for taking photographs. We returned to Holbrook after seeing the park, and spent some time at the Navajo County Museum in the old courthouse in Holbrook. The guides there spent a bunch of time chatting with us and showing us around the museum, which included Indian artifacts World War II era relics, and rooms that displayed old style drugstore, barber shop, post office, and phone operator settings.

We also shopped around for a Kachina doll at some of the trading posts in town, and did a little bit of souvenir hunting.

Heading back to the hotel room we made plans to explore a very different landscape the next day: Arizona's White Mountains.