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Petrified Forest and Painted Desert


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The Petrified Forest was a totally awe-inspiring experience. Of course, I'd heard of petrified wood, but had never really thought about what it was or how it came to be. About 225 million years ago this area was covered with tall trees, probably some types of pine trees. As the trees died and fell over, they were washed into a flood plain and eventually covered with mud, silt and volcanic ash. This covering slowed down the decay of the logs. Silica-laden ground water soaked into the wood and the silica crystallized into quartz over time producing petrified wood, which was being buried deeper and deeper by various deposits of sediment. The area was then uplifted a lot later, bringing the logs closer to the surface. As wind and water erodes the landscape these magnificent objects are uncovered and revealed to us. Different elements present during the process produce different coloured quartz, and so we get rainbow hued petrified wood. All through the Park there are pieces of the wood lying everywhere. Sometimes there are almost whole logs, cracked into pieces by the earth's movement. From a distance they look like ordinary logs, but come close and they are stones of the most amazing colours.
Throughout the Park there is evidence of early occupation - ruins of villages, similar to the one we saw at Tuzigoot yesterday, petroglyphs and pot sherds - and also of much earlier life in the form of fossilized remains, particularly of small dinosaurs from the late Triassic Period. Petrified wood is much more common than I realised. A display at the Rainbow Forest Museum in the Park showed different types from most states of this country. Juergen saw his first examples of it in Western Australia, when he was first travelling in Australia.
The countryside is also quite amazing in the Park, and not only because it is littered with petrified wood. It is part of the Painted Desert, so called because the landscape is covered in Mesas, Buttes and other interestingly shaped Hoodoos and outcrops, in colourful stripes, produced by the presence of iron, carbon, manganese and other minerals in the formations.
The Painted Desert continues along the I-40 into New Mexico - the area on the border is known as Painted Cliffs, and the colours in the afternoon light were amazing.
We chose to get our "kicks" from driving once again the Historical Route 66, which follows this highway (and sometimes coincides with it) over the border into New Mexico to Gallup. The "kicks" along this stretch resulted mostly from an un-kept road surface, since this part of Route 66, parallel to an Interstate, is almost obsolete... The most interesting thing to see is a forest of old-fashioned neon signs in Gallup which fit the historical character of Route 66 extremely well.
We drove on past Gallup to find our chosen campground for the night. After finding one road closed (13 miles down the road with no sign at the beginning), some off-road adventure and backtracking to take another route, we arrived at the Bluewater Lake State Park to find it almost empty, but with plenty of evidence of it being crowded over the holiday weekend. I guess it takes a few days to get it properly cleaned up and the 'full' signs to be taken down. But it has 'hot' showers and also electric hookups (a chance to recharge the camera battery). It is also at 7500 feet, so I guess another cold night is coming.