Touring the Wild, Wild West

Massive petrified logs. Agate House in the distance.

On the Rocks: The Petrified Forest 

Although we would have liked to have spent some time in the Flagstaff area, we set that aside for a future trip (we're always looking ahead), and blew on through on Interstate 40 to Winslow, where we dry camped (also called boondocking) in the WalMart parking lot.

(For those of you who are concerned about hygiene, dry camping doesn't mean we don't take showers. We have a propane water heater, separate tanks for fresh water, gray water, and sewage, and with careful management we can do quite well.)

Wood turned to rainbow-hued quartz.

On the road early the next morning, we soon came to one of the most fascinating places (at least, to us) on our trip -- Petrified Forest National Park, where fallen tree trunks soaked up ground water and silica from volcanic ash and over time crystallized into quartz in rainbow hues. 

A forest of stone.

The Petrified Forest is not a spectacular place, in the way that Bryce Canyon or Arches or Zion are spectacular, but it offers a great variety of intensely interesting things to see. We consider it one of our favorite national parks. 

The Agate House

We took the two-mile hike from the Rainbow Forest Visitor's Center through petrified chunks of logs, most of them quite large, to the Agate House, a seven-room pueblo built 1050-1300 A.D. of chunks of petrified wood. It was reconstructed on the original foundation in 1934. A number of other Puebloan dwellings have been found, including one with 100 rooms, but only the Agate House has been reconstructed. The others have been left as they were for archaeologists and others to study. 

A resident of the desert.

Since we had entered the park at the south end, we drove north slowly on park roads, finding strange and new things at every turn. We'll continue exploring the Petrified Forest in Monday's post.

Fuji X-T20, Fujinon XC 16-50mm f3.5-5.6 OISII and XC 50-230mm f4.8-6.3 OIS lenses.

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(Photographs copyright David B. Jenkins 2020) 

Soli Gloria Deo

To the glory of God alone