Painted Desert and Petrified Forest

Today we took a pleasant drive from Holbrook, Arizona to see the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest.

The Painted Desert is some of the most beautiful hills and valleys I've ever seen. There are many various colors and they look as though some artist painted them. I'll let you be the judge of just how beautiful they are.

The Petrified Forest are stories of climate and culture told in stone. This high, dry grassland was once a vast floodplain crossed by many streams. Tall stately conifer trees grew along the banks. Crocodile-like reptiles, giant amphibians and small dinosaurs lived among a variety of ferns, Cy cads and other plants.

The trees fell and swollen streams washed them into adjacent floodplains. A mix of silt, mud, and volcanic ash buried the logs. This sediment cut off oxygen and slowed the logs decay. Silica-laden groundwater seeped through the logs and replaced the original wood tissues with silica deposits. Eventually the silica crystallized into quarts and the logs were preserved as petrified wood.