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Published: March 9th 2008
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Obfuscator writes: We had a Continental Breakfast consisting of donuts and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches before leaving our Holbrook Motel for the Petrified Forest. The town of Holbrook seems to have an abundance of big plexiglass dinosaurs at every conceivable location. That would be pretty cool, you know, if they were big and scary and had sharp teeth for killing tourists. These were somewhat more lame than that, looking more like puffy cartoon versions of dinosaurs. There were a few that seemed like maybe they were supposed to look kind of ferocious, but mostly they all just looked adorable.
A short drive later, and we found ourselves near the entrance to the park, where some enterprising people have made their living selling petrified wood and other souvenirs that can't be obtained inside the park. They have more of the cute giant roadside dinosaurs, and a pyramid-monument to the park, complete with big chunks of what may be crystals and such from the Petrified Forest. They really wanted us to come in and visit their free museum and see all their free stuff. It didn't seem like it was going to be a good business model to us, so we
Sinclair oil mascots
and in front of them, two fiberglass critters fight to the death! figured there had to be some catch, and we pressed on to the actual park. (Onaxthiel adds: I think Obfuscator just really doesn't like kitschy road side attractions. I wanted to go in!)
We entered by Rainbow Forest, and stopped at the museum there. They've got some cool fossils of huge carnivorous reptiles that are in pretty much every way like dinosaurs, but aren't. Apparently those haughty scienticians think some minor differences in the hips and ankles make them more closely related to Alligators than to our good buddy T-Rex. Regardless, these Triassic monsters have been found throughout the Petrified Forest, where they apparently used to enjoy the lush tropical environs of the time. We were also told that an estimated one ton of petrified wood disappears from the park every month! That's why they now have barbed wire fences and checkpoints with armed guards everywhere. Actually, I just made that last part up, but we did have to wonder how they can accurately measure the amount that disappears by weight in any given month. The park is pretty huge.
Now, you might be wondering, “Why are Obfuscator and Onaxthiel even stopping in a Petrified Forest? There's petrified
wood all over in the United States. They even found some boring rock-wood in boring old North Dakota way back in the trip. Who cares about rocks anyway?” You might not know, but the Petrified Forest, the one that's a National Park, is well known, because unlike all that other petrified wood, the stuff at this park is actually pretty. There's a geological explanation for this, but I can't be asked to remember sciency things. The important bit is that back in the Triassic, Nevada was equatorial, and lush. Big trees grew there, and big rivers like the Amazon ran through it. Logs fell down, got waterlogged, and then colorful silica infiltrated every cell of it, such that when it dried out, it crystallized, or something. From a distance, these trees look pretty much like a regular log laying in a desert might look. Up close, you can see the bright colors and neat rocky bits.
Sometimes they get broken, by ice in cracks, by lightning, or by vandals with dynamite. There's a huge log called Old Faithful that got cracked apart by lightning, on a nice path just out the back of the museum. Back in the day,
the Park Service didn't like nature messing with nature, and they concreted the behemoth back together. Now, of course, they don't approve of such things, and would leave the fragments of Old Faithful scattered about so that you can't appreciate them.
A short distance from the museum, we took a path called the Long Logs trail, which had even more of vividly colored petrified wood, and also took us to Agate House, a pueblo style building built out of petrified wood. Part of the structure has been reconstructed (again inconsistent with current NPS philosophy), but it's really cool to see the structure built of such lovely material. A bit further down the road from here, there's a great side road that will take you to Blue Mesa. The area of blue mesa is one of the most striking in the park, with a big canyon and high walls that are tinted in shades of blue and purple. Depending on the lighting, much of it looks sort of grey, but when the light hits it right, sure enough, blue and purple. It's stunning.
Continuing down the park road a bit further, you get to Newspaper Rock, a set of
This is not a Dinosaur.
But it's second name is kirkpatricki. That rocks. I want this thing to represent me at the UN several boulders with ancient petroglyphs on them. The natives of the area didn't have a formal written language, but that didn't stop them from leaving their marks. You can't get right up to them, since the Park Service wants to protect them, but you can look through some free scopes to see them pretty clearly, and if you have a good zoom, your camera will get them too. Still a bit further, you'll find the ruins of a pueblo village, and still more boulders with petroglyphs. This was a fascinating stretch of road.
Finally, you cross I-40, and the remnants of old Route 66, and you come to the Painted Desert. It's a vast wasteland, but it's got lovely pastel colors all over the place. We didn't hike it, though apparently there are a few good trails. We settled for some good vistas, and got moving, as we had arrived at the end of the park.
We drove back past Flagstaff, and down to the town of Cottonwood. Along the way, we passed through the Oak Creek Canyon, past Sedona, and past the Red Rock State Park. The views were really quite lovely, but because it was getting
late, the sun was in a bad position for us to get many pictures, and we wanted to reach our campground before it got too dark anyway. It was a decent campground with nice facilities, and we obtained a huge box of scrap 2x4s to burn for a good price. All in all, we had a decent night in Cottonwood.
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David K
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History repeats
The question now is whether you can pinpoint the era when the petroglyphic media started putting the Page Two celebrities onto Page One of the Newspaper Rock and then try to find the independent liberal newspaper pebbles complaining about the devolution of "The Big News Rock" media.