We’re out of the Navajo reservation and into Arizona, back to regular time. Arizona does not recognize daylight savings time, while the Navajo nation does. As we crossed into Arizona, we set our watches back: Spring ahead, Fall back.
Many years ago, somewhere around 1971, two of us drove across the US from Rhode Island where I taught, to Catalina Island off the coast of Long Beach, CA, to work in a Girl Scout camp. Obviously, it was a fast trip and though we saw many sights like the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, the Tetons, Lake Tahoe and the Petrified Forest, we really didn’t ‘see’ them. We stopped long enough to get a picture of them and moved on. And, even those pictures have faded. Now, finally, I am seeing those things which I ‘missed’ on my first trip. Today we are visiting the Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert.
What is most impressive about the park, aside from the natural beauty, is the amazing efforts the Rangers put forth to keep the park from being stolen. This is one park where each visitor can steal a small part and, after hundreds of thousands of visitors each year, there will be no more park. You can’t walk into Yellowstone and steal Old Faithful, you can’t walk into Yosemite and steal Half Dome. But you can walk into the Petrified Forest and steal a bit of petrified wood, thinking that one little piece won’t matter. Soon, all that will be left are the largest logs which are too heavy to carry away.
Soon after the park was discovered in the mid-1800’s, people began to visit, take pieces of wood for their collections and the disappearing act began. Finally, Theodore Roosevelt set aside selected sections of the of the petrified trees as the Petrified Forest National Monument in 1906. Did that stop the theft? Heavens no. Still happening. When you enter the park, you are given a card so that, if you spot theft, you can report it. When you leave the park, they inspect your vehicle. They open your trunk, your doors and scan whatever is in the car.
It’s not as if our National Parks aren’t in a constant state of flux, transforming daily. Glaciers are disappearing in Glacier National Park, in Arches NP erosion caused the 71’ wide Wall Arch to fall, in Yosemite, an 1800 cubic yard slab of granite fell crushing cabins and injuring campers. But, all of this is natural. At Petrified Forest man is the culprit, stealing rocks at a rate of 12 tons per year.
The Park actually has several attractions: the Painted Desert which is a cavalcade of color from deep reds to dusty mauves to brighter oranges. There are some overlooks from which one can view the vast sweep of the Desert.
There is also the Old Painted Desert Inn, built prior to 1920.
Made originally out of petrified wood, it was called the Stone Tree House. However, it was built upon bentonite clay which has an annoying habit of shifting depending upon the moisture. The foundation of the Inn began to crack and have water damage. In the 1930’s the National Park System purchased it and with plans to stabilize it and rebuild it in the current Pueblo Revival Style, the Arts and Craft style in the desert. The CCC completely redid the building, putting ponderosa pine and aspen poles in the ceiling,
covering the old petrified logs with adobe,
and hand painting this magnificent skylight.
They hand punched tin light fixtures and etched the concrete floors in a Navajo run design. Those CCC guys were amazing. Anyone who visits a National Park owes a great debt to them.
Later Fred Harvey bought the Inn, hired Mary Colter to redesign parts. She hired Fred Kabotie, a renowned Hopi artist to paint murals on the walls and created a new color scheme. Today, however, it is still on bentonite clay and still needs to be stabilized.
Finally, there is the drive through the park with various stop-offs to view and to walk around some ruins and petroglyphs, some different colored cliffs, some areas where there are more petrified logs than others and finally at the south visitor center where there is another short trail to walk around some petrified logs.
We enjoyed it all and took several trails among the hills and logs. However, everywhere we looked, we were reminded of a quote from a petrified log collector, Grace Spradling, 1917, who said: ‘We had filled out hats with chips, Reached Forest #1 (the Jasper Forest) about noon, resorted our collections…Oh such a time as we did have deciding which part of the forest to leave and which part to pack out.’ And, this was after it was protected by the Federal Government.
Wherever we looked, we asked ourselves, how many petrified logs used to be here?
And, amazingly, there are stores which will give you FREE petrified log pieces right out side the park. And, not just one place, but several. These all come from private land since the National Park covers only 10% of the petrified forest. We later visited one of these petrified wood dealers, where there were hundreds of logs of all sizes in their store and out back in their lot. They also had fossils, a huge alligator fossil from Florida,
and a shell fossil.
a purple geode with several petrified rocks, one made into a table,
tons of polished petrified rocks in their store
and tons more piled in their back yard,
You name it, they’ve got it. What size do you want and do you want it polished? Why steal from the National Park from all of us?
And, finally, it was time to head home.
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