February 14, 2005 - Drive to Petrified Forest National Park.

Since our intended destination of Holbrook, Arizona, near the Petrified Forest National Park, was not that far, we knew we could take our time packing up and leaving the Grand Canyon. That meant time for a leisurely breakfast as well as time to check the tire pressures, dump the wastewater tanks, and so forth. We were finally on the road south to Williams by about 9:30.

At Williams we turned east on Interstate 40 past the peaks of the San Francisco mountains and through Flagstaff, where we had walked on Wanderung 3, and descended a bit from 7,000 to about 5,000 feet. But what a difference that altitude change made on the vegetation! Instead of the nice pine forests of the high plateau, down at 5,000 feet it again looked like desert, mostly sagebrush with a little grass or sedge stuff thrown in. Not even cacti grew in that desert, and Monika guessed that we were far enough north that maybe the hard freezes would prevent cacti from growing, which sounded reasonable to me.

I think I finally figured out where Zane Grey got that "purple sage" stuff (i.e. "Riders of the Purple Sage"). Some of the sage was kind of gray-green and other sage plants were brown, either dead or dormant. Well, if you looked at a patch with a mixture of both the green and brown sage from a distance, it kind of blended into a purplish smudge, so I guess that is what he was referring to. As we drove on past the southern edge of the Navajo Reservation, we saw a peculiarly shaped cloud on the horizon to the east. It turned out that the cloud was due to the cooling evaporators of the Cholla Power Plant, clearly a coal-fired plant. We also saw what looked like strip mining for the coal to run the plant-the entire side of a mountain was being chopped away to get at a thick black seam that I think was coal. The Cholla plant seemed rather clean in that I could not see visible smoke from the twin stacks despite the fact that the plant was clearly in operation.

We arrived to Holbrook about 1 p.m. and set up the trailer before hopping over to a Taco Bell for lunch and then on to the Petrified Forest National Park for the remainder of the afternoon. Our RV site cost $20 per night, and I was amused to find that the older hotels in Holbrook were also charging $20 per night. That was one of the few times I had seen hotels and RV sites at the same price, and although it may seem to most readers that the hotel would be the better deal, we were happier in our own trailer in the RV park. Park of that was being in our own place, so to speak, and part of it was being able to fix our own morning and evening meals rather than having to eat all meals out.

However, from the standpoint of the profit made by the proprietor, it seemed to me that the overhead on the RV park must be much less than the overhead on a similar set of motel rooms. So although I could see how the RV park might still make a profit, I really could not understand how the hotel folks could stay in business. In any case, after we reached the south end of town we turned west on a 2-lane highway to reach the Petrified Forest National Park. We started our tour at the south end of the park, which actually has a southern section with the Petrified Forest and a northern section with the Painted Desert. Our first stop was the Visitor Center for the Petrified Forest section, and we found that it had a small 1-room museum explaining the ancient origin of the petrified trees.

In back of the Visitor Center was a nice nature trail with numbered exhibits, so we walked around that for the next half hour or so. There were far more petrified trees that I recalled from a visit 25 years ago, but I'm not sure if they changed the paths or if my memory is playing tricks on me again. In any case the trees themselves were magnificent, although also strange in that they now are basically a hard, crystalline rock somewhat like quartz but in the exact shape of the ex-tree. Now that all happened about 200 million years ago-it's not a quick process by any means-so these trees had spent an awful lot of time being buried and turned to stone.

The slow, gradual process had almost miraculously preserved the details of the ex-trees. We saw some of these trees still covered with "bark", and those crystal formations really looked exactly like bark on a modern tree. We also saw other parts of the tree like the knotholes where the branches had been attached or bugs had eaten cavities in it. Even the tree rings for yearly growth had been faithfully preserved by this process in some of the trunks, which is pretty amazing when you think about it.

Although the structure of the ex-tree was preserved during this crystal formation process, the original colors were not. In fact, a whole palette of new colors was added depending on what type of minerals seeped in with the water solution that made the crystal deposits. We saw red, brown, yellow, purple, and black most commonly, but not a lot of blue.

Another thing we learned was that some of the trees had crystals form inside each cell, but the cell walls were still the original stuff, whereas other trees had both the inside of the cell and ultimately the cell wall itself replaced by the crystal deposits. That might explain how the bark on some of those trees looked so real, but I'm not sure. When we visited other deposits of the petrified trees down the road from the Visitor Center we saw some examples that were splitting apart in a way that made me think they still had their original cell walls rather than being crystal all the way through.

The trees that were crystal all the way through became like huge hunks of crystal, which is to say strong in a sense but also very brittle. In fact, many of the large trunks that we saw lying on the ground had fractured in sections, apparently along the crystal planes, but it was so regular that it looked just like a lumberjack had used a chainsaw to saw them into lengths. The strength of the crystallized trees was demonstrated at the "Agate Bridge" where a roughly 100-foot long tree was perched from one bank to the other across a small stream, just like a log bridge.

Monika's ankle was getting tired and I wanted to get to the Painted Desert for a picture before the park closed at 5 p.m., so we delayed visiting some of the Petrified Forest exhibits until the next day and drove to the northern section of the park. Along the way we passed some pyramid-shaped hills known as the Teepees that reminded me very strongly of the Badlands we had visited in North and South Dakota (see Wanderung 6 and Wanderung 3, respectively).

We did reach the Painted Desert in time to take a few pictures as the sun was starting to set in the west. Since most of the actual desert lies to the east of the park road and the overlooks, the setting sun illuminated it quite nicely. It was an eerie scene, with the hills banded in strange and vivid colors marching off toward the horizon, but also hard to photograph due to the distance and scope of the vista. A human brain is very good at integrating a wide sweep of a visual field as your eye traverses the landscape, but the camera just can't do the same thing.

I tried taking some panoramic shots to capture the scope and grandeur of the view, which was quite a challenge. First, I had to pick the viewpoint that would make a decent panoramic shot. The viewpoint had to have a very unobstructed line of sight to the main part of the panorama, and you would be surprised how many views are obstructed by one thing or the other. Again, the human brain is good at interpreting the scene despite an obstruction, but a camera is just recording what it sees, and it sees the obstructions.

Next I had to carefully take the sequence of shots in order, usually from left to right. But I had to make sure there was just the right amount of overlap for the software to stitch together the image back on Baby. Basically, I had to act like a tripod with a swivel on top and slowly swing the camera through the panoramic arc while stopping to take a picture for each segment. I'm sure some of the folks who watched me do that were wondering what on earth I was doing, but everyone was quite polite about not getting in the shots.

The park finally closed at 5 p.m. and we headed back west on Interstate 40 to our campground in Holbrook to treat ourselves to some free showers before dinner (making up for the Grand Canyon dearth?). During dinner we discussed the situation and decided to take another day to see the things in the park that we had not had time for. Afterwards we worked on the computers until 9 or so when we felt like we were becoming cross-eyed and then called it quits for the evening.