January 18, 2020 Petrified Forest

Hi everyone.  On this Saturday we left Albuquerque and traveled to the Petrified Forest National Park.  The same area also includes the Painted Desert area which is in much display through the beginning of the park.  The Visitor's Center had a short video of the park as well as some samples to be seen in the park.

This piece of Petrified Rock is about 18 inches across and the surface is smoothed to a flat surface.

The Painted Desert  is home to some of the nation’s most memorable formations and features, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods, and sunlight, all combined to create the Painted Desert. Deposits of clay and sandstone, stacked in layers, reflects the sun to produce a colorful appearance.

One theme that was stressed through the visit is that the land is ever changing due to the above events.

The Painted Desert Inn was at one time an active place for people to stay when visiting the park.  The rooms were very tiny.  Guests are no longer allowed to stay.

This picture around one of the doors shows what the original building looked like.

The many layers seen here actually represent different ages of time that, when doing some digging may represent 10's of thousands of years difference in the time of formation.

This feature known as Newspaper Rock contains Petroglyphs, some as much as 2000 years old.

Petrified wood is a fossil. It forms when plant material is buried by sediment and protected from decay due to oxygen and organisms. Then, groundwater rich in dissolved solids flows through the sediment, replacing the original plant material with silica, calcite, pyrite, or another inorganic material such as opal.  Much of the area in the area was covered with water which helped to create those conditions.

A look at a cross section of petrified wood reveals the different colors created by the content of the minerals.

Grammie, next to a fairly long length of petrified tree.

This shows the effect of flooding that is powerful enough to move not pieces of wood, but rather pieces of Petrified Wood. 

We had an opportunity to walk down a path in a section called the Blue Mesa. 

This is an explanation for the picture above.  The surface is actually soft.

Currently there are 2 parts of the park that are not accessible using the North entrance.  

They are the Crystal Forest and the Jasper Forest.

One thing that may seem a little odd is that there really aren't any tall trees that would make up a forest.  This was actually covered by water that led to the petrification.

Grammie enjoyed her walk through the "Forest"

Thanks for keeping an eye out for Grammie's travels.