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East meets West
This is Ronnie's shop. Everything was covered with a thick layer of dust. Not sure when he had his last customer...Actually, we took a drive thru the Petrified Forest National Park on Monday, May 25th. Gail had been to this park back when she was just a little girl of 8 or 9 years old and was so impressed she decided Sue needed to see this place.
The Petrified Forest National Park is along Interstate 40 just past Holbrook and as we drove thru Holbrook, we saw a really junky looking place offering petrified wood and souvenirs, so Sue read Gail's mind and pulled in. We met Ronnie, an old self described south-western hillbilly. He was a hoot and it was even better when we got some real silver jewelry for a reduced price...well, when Sue started to walk away from some $50 earrings, he was quick to tell her that she could have them for $20. Sue had already bought something for the full asking price. Ronnie must have known we were naive about the art of haggling, although Gail does much better. She says that Dear Old Daddy Frank would call this "getting the best deal for your buck." Part of her treasure cache that day was 3 dusty old troll dolls. There were 5 or 6 but
one had a body part bitten off so Gail asked if she could take his shorts off and put them on one of the other dolls. Ronnie was a good sport about it all. We must have spent a total of $100 between the 2 of us so it was a really good day for him given the other junk he had in the store. Sue did ask him re getting some petrified wood, that we had a coupon for 1/2 pound/car at one of the other souvenir places so Ronnie says, "I'll tell you what...see that pile of petrified wood out there (the whole yard was full of the stuff but he was pointing to a bin of small pieces), well, you each git one." We did, then we spotted a bin of bits and pieces and he let us take as much as we wanted from that bin. Of course, that took some searching for the perfect bits of petrified wood, the ones that "spoke" to us.
For the sake of brevity, we have copied and pasted info re the Petrified Forest and the Painted
Desert from Wikipedia, where you can always find information about anything you
are curious about...
The Petrified Forest in Arizona features one of the world's largest and most colorful concentrations of petrified wood. Sue was expecting the trees to be like in the bush in northern Ontario, still standing but these fossilized trees were carried here and left when some great water came and went. (We have had so many geology lessons in the past week, our heads our swimming, one more than the other.) But it was so unique to see these logs turned into stone lying all over the desert. There were some beautiful pieces. It is against the law to remove anything from the forest so we just drove through.
The park consists of two large areas connected by a north-south corridor. The northern area encompasses part of the multi-coloured badlands of the Upper Triassic Chinle Formation called the Painted Desert. The southern area includes colorful terrain and several concentrations of petrified wood. Several American Indian petroglyph sites are also found in the southern area. Near the south end of the park is Agate House, a Native American building of petrified wood, reconstructed during the 1930s.
Unfortunately, our pictures do not show exactly how it looks. It is difficult to experience the size of the hills etc and to see the really beautiful colours. Of course, we are so used to the dramatic colours of the Canadian Shield and when the seasons changed. Here, it has its own unique beauty. Unfortunately, most of the good pictures are on a 4 GB HD card which Sue has been unable to download to the computer...so we did borrow some pictures from Wikipedia along with the text, which we have put in BOLD. So if this is too "heavy" for you, just skip to the pictures.
The pieces of permineralized wood are fossil Araucariaceae, a family of trees that is extinct in the Northern Hemisphere but survives in isolated stands in the Southern Hemisphere. During the Late Triassic, this desert region was located in the tropics and was seasonally wet and dry. In seasonal flooding, the trees washed from where they grew and accumulated in sandy river channels, where they were buried periodically by layers of gravely sand, rich in volcanic ash from volcanoes further to the west. The volcanic ash was the source of the silica that helped to permineralize the buried logs, replacing wood with silica, colored with oxides of iron and manganese. Several major and many smaller concentrations of petrified wood occur in the park, corresponding to several stratigraphic intervals in the Sonsela Member and aptly named Petrified Forest Member of the Chinle Formation. The major concentrations have been termed "forests" (e.g. Rainbow Forest, Crystal Forest, Black Forest, etc.) although the vast majority of the fossil tree trunks are preserved in a prone position and have been transported at least some distance from their original growth areas. However, in-place stumps of trees do occur in several areas (not easily accessible to the casual visitor), and many of the logs probably did not travel far before burial.
Petrified log in Petrified Forest NP
The Chinle Formation at Petrified Forest National Park also has produced abundant fossil leaves, vertebrates (including giant crocodile-like reptiles called phytosaurs, large salamander-like amphibians called metoposaurs, some of the earliest dinosaur fossils from North America), and invertebrates (including freshwater snails and clams).
Much of the striking banded coloration of the Chinle Formation badlands that make up the Painted Desert region is due to soil formation (pedogenesis) during the Late Triassic. These paleosols (ancient soils) preserve evidence of conditions during the Triassic
including the nature of the landscape and the paleoclimate. The Chinle paleosols suggest that the climate was dramatically seasonal, with distinct very wet and very dry seasons. This climate was probably similar to the modern monsoon of the Indian Ocean region, and was characteristic of tropical areas of Late Paleozoic and Early Mesozoic Earth when all the continents had assembled to form the supercontinent Pangaea.
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Marty
non-member comment
Rocks
HEY.....new meaning to trowing rocks at other peoples houses....lol Hugs miss you both but you all are having way to much fun......