After leaving the national monuments, we headed east, to Petrified Forest National Park. We backpacked one night in the wilderness northern portion of the park (the part north of I-40, more or less, which the park straddles), and then walked around in that area for a bit, before returning to our cars and heading south to the southern parts of the park, before heading to Phoenix for our final night in Arizona, before all heading home.
So, indeed, we drove on out to the Petrified Forest. While much of the park is actually “authorized” as the park boundary, most of that land is actually still privately held and might someday become part of the park (as seen at this pdf). However, even given that, the bulk of the northern part of the park is wilderness, and I’d read on the website that you could do
backcountry camping there, with basically no restrictions, so once we got there we picked up a permit for this. (The southern areas are largely private, just being park for some distance on either side of the road with some of the most popular visitation sites open to visit).
Hanging out outside, you know.
The basic idea is that you parked your car at the top point of a loop road, and then head out into the desert. The rules for where you could camp were basically that you had to be out past this large wash, and you had to be out of sight of the visitor center where we parked (so as not to mar the viewing experience!) They also suggested we not actually camp in a wash, tempting as it might seem, since in the very very off chance that there was any precipitation, that could have a pretty negative impact. So, we got out to this loop section, and checked out the other visitor center there for a bit, and then headed down a trail into the wilderness area.
Heading out into into the flats
This leads into one of many sets of fairly interchangeable canyons, so you want to annotate clearly where you get in (so that you can get out), but other than that, it’s a fairly open area with wide views, so it’s pretty hard to get lost (which is part of why they want you to go so far out.) Anyway, there is trail to follow down into the desert area, but it disappears rapidly once you actually get down there, and we were left to pick our way through the scrub and rocks – not really much of a problem. We started seeing small pieces of petrified wood, and then were really excited to see a piece about a foot in all dimensions. Crazy, we thought!
First sizeable piece of petrified wood we saw
Anyway, we kept heading out, just loving the rocks and the plants and the light…it really was spectacular. We kept cutting this way and that, wondering if we had come to the wash yet, as we followed all sorts of smaller washes hither and yon (as they made fairly good footpaths). There were all these really spectacular striated rocks that we all really enjoyed. After a bit, still not sure if we had come to the wash or not, we came to a large open area that was clearly not actually in a wash path, but was shaded by a large hill from view of the visitor center, and also had some open spaces we could actually pitch our tents in. Once we got set up, we clambered around a bit on some nearby rocks, and took a lot of pictures of the sunset, and rocks, and each other, and generally just kept saying “wow” at the outdoors we were all in. I felt far more immersed than I had when I was at the Grand Canyon , in some ways, since this landscape was both far broader and far more human scale , all at the same time.
Alex on the striated rocks, heading up, heading towards the light
standing before the sunrise, clear against the sky
we barely show up in the landscape. as it should be.
After enjoying the evening and the beauty of the sunset, we went to bed. The next morning, we were up in time for the sunrise, which was equally beautiful as the sunset had been. We mostly packed up our stuff, but then left it there as we walked off to explore a bit more of the desert. We headed out north, to try and get too some better petrified wood, and before long, we realized that we had not, in fact, gotten to the wash before, and that if you were unsure if you had gotten to the wash, you had, in fact, not yet gotten to the wash. This thing was a good few hundred feet across – it was like a major highway running through the middle of the desert. There was no way to miss it. As we got there, we started seeing some bigger pieces of down wood, and then we crossed the wash, and headed up this hill / mesa behind it. We had to scramble our way up the slope a bit, but once up there, we were able to find entire downed and petrified trees, broken into pieces as nicely as if they had been sawed. Huge chunks of tree, looking as if they had been placed perfectly across the landscape for us to sit on. Lengths of tree, looking like snakes across the landscape.
really. if you don’t think you’ve found the wash, you haven’t
we found your missing trees, ma’am. needless to say, at this point, the smaller pieces were less impressive.
We hung out up there a bit, looking off into the further distance, but then decided to head back. It was a bit of trouble to get back down the slope, but we all scooted our ways down, and made it to the bottom. In pausing a couple times on the way, I took the chance to really note some of the very beautiful, very well adapted small plants that were everywhere in this desert. From this area, we really got some better views that let us appreciate this being the “painted” desert. From then, we walked back and picked up our possessions, then walked back through and up to our cars.
the eye is staring at dave, out of the hill
I loved the detail and color on the closeup on the plant
just capturing a bit of why “painted desert” is apt
From there, we continued south on the main road through the park, stopping at many of the smaller attractions along the way. We stopped at Puerco Pueblo, another ruined pueblo which along with Newspaper Rock have a lot of awesome petroglyphs to look at. We then drove up to the Blue Mesa and walked along the bit of trail up there, checking out all the “tepees”, that are , in fact, blue to go along with the red of
the rocks.
petroglyphs tell us about how life works – stork…stabs person?
always a good moment to take a break
they can call them teepees all they want, I’m going to stick with “blue candycorn”
From there we went and checked out the Crystal Forest, which has some really spectacularly beautiful examples of petrified wood alongside and generally near a paved path. Many of the examples here were more stunning than those we saw on our backcountry section that morning, but the environment was much more mediated, so it was an interesting tradeoff. After that we stopped at the Visitor Center / Museum to be found at the south entrance of the park, and checked out the exhibits there, before getting back on the road.
the broken tree and the unbroken path both provide sinuous curves
sliced up, just like bread. rocky, tree like bread.
We stopped in Holbrook for late lunch, and then drove to Phoenix, through the Sitgreaves Forest, which had some beautiful views in its own right, especially as heading up and up and actually seeing some woods was such a change. We made it to Phoenix that night and checked into sketchy-land motel, and then the next morning Alex, Beth, and Dave flew home, while Erin and I drove back to LA, on I-10 all the way completing the loop. There were lots of pretty blooming ocotillo cactus along the way.
we were staying in a fairly soulless part of phoenix (even as phoenix goes), but man, this sunrise was killer.
