Petrified Forest

Petrified Forest National Park, AZ

I feel myself changing on this journey. Maybe the better way to describe it is I am discovering things about myself I didn’t know were there. I seem to thrive on the unknown – the expectation of the unfamiliar causes an adrenaline surge and makes me feel alive. I have always been a planner, and I have lived my life by researching ahead, by deadlines, and by the calendar, filled with linear tasks. This must be done before that. Complete Duty A before moving to Duty B. Our work and family lives predispose us to this necessity. But out in the wild, where there are no work or community expectations or responsibilities, the ability to focus on the Now with no regard for the Next is exhilarating. Maybe even transforming.

The Petrified Forest somehow epitomizes this revelation for me. The name itself sets an expectation for what you believe you will encounter. It is something else altogether.

At the north end of the park is the Painted Desert in all its colorful splendor. The middle of the park surprises and delights with changes in color, topography, and rock formations. The south end of the park is littered with fallen trees, petrified in beautiful, colorful quartz, and in pieces like an ancient lumberjack worked his way across the desert, felling every improbable tree he could find, leaving only cross-sections as his calling card.

Dogs are allowed on all trails in the Petrified Forest, and the Painted Desert Rim Trail in the north gives a lovely view of the colors and textures of the hills and valleys that stretch as far as the eye can see, to and beyond the horizon. The trail overlooks miles and miles of pink hills, mesas, and valleys, changing in hues from coral and auburn to yellow and sage, and changing in shades from palest pastel to dark and rich. There is a little snow on the ground, highlighting the ridges and edges. The trail leads to an old pueblo inn, no longer in service but used as a landmark and historical education center.

On this trail I met Jake, a cute, gregarious, curly-haired, 30-something, also visiting parks, also car camping. He was from New York and had traveled many different National Parks in a quest to be free from the office-grind. I couldn’t quite get the feel if he was independently wealthy and felt he had earned this lifestyle or if he had thrown the 9-to-5 to the wind with reckless abandon. Not that it matters. He was freely living his best life out here, and in him I found a kindred spirit.

Ella and I worked our way through the park from the Painted Desert to the Petrified Forest, and about halfway through, the mesas turn from pink to black. Still streaked with snow, the dark and dusky hills and mesas are in stark contrast to where we were. Strange and ethereal rock formations emerge out of flat, yellow, grassy plains. Then, just as suddenly, the colors transform again back to the pinks and corals, but also to blues and purples.

Here at the Blue Mesa is a trail through the ancient canyon, striated with colors. The blues start subtly, a pale turquoise-gray and soft magenta that grow richer the deeper you go. The trail is a pretty good heart-pumper with a nice elevation change as you go from the top of the mesas to the bottom of the canyon. Ridges in the mesas have been formed by eons of water trickling down from the crown, forming individual rivulets in a beautifully balanced cascade. Every once in a while, there are segments of petrified trees collected in the valleys.

Snow is still accumulated in areas that don’t get full sun. At the center of the hike is a giant piece of petrified wood, a taste of what is a few miles away. It is pink and orange with a crystalline surface.

At the southern end of the park, in the Crystal Canyon and the Rainbow Forest, hundreds of thousands of pieces of petrified wood cover the landscape. Some are as big around as Ella is long. On each, the rocky bark is striped with red and brown, like redwoods, and the centers are bejeweled with colorful quartz. On some, the rings were clearly visible belying a hidden yet decipherable history. Where the wood was chiseled away at the edges by erosion, time, or people’s hands, the pieces fell in chips looking for all the world like fresh wood chips. Each segment was a marvel.

These trees are believed to be hundreds of millions of years old – conifers in an ancient forest inhabited by dinosaurs. After eons of floods, lava flows, tectonic shifts, and erosion, the petrified trees have unearthed, and as they did, they broke into sections with the shifts of the earth’s surface. Because they are quartz they break on a cleavage, so it looks like they have been segmented with a chainsaw. It’s a little disconcerting seeing these once majestic, living giants preserved as crystalline firewood. At the same time, it’s mysterious and awe-inspiring.

Leaving the forest and marveling over the vast changes of the park from north to south, I am reminded of how similar we are to these ancient trees and their landscape. There is so much happening inside our psyches as our minds and hearts constantly evolve. What people perceive of us on the outside – and even what we know of our own selves – is only a fraction of the work that is being done on the inside, sometimes without us being aware of it.

The discoveries of self here have been as surprising as the discoveries of nature. Meeting like-minded strangers like Jake helps guide my unraveling awareness. Casting off the past and diving into the unknown began as an uncomfortable necessity but has become invigorating and intoxicating. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting from this park, but it sure wasn’t all this!