Petrified Forest National Park United States

Legendary

View this park's large deposits of petrified wood, pueblos, and colorful badlands.

Photo by Jeff Hollett

Kid Rating:

Every year, visitors mail rocks back to this park. They come with apology letters, some written decades after the person stole a piece of petrified wood and decided it brought them bad luck.

Rangers call them "conscience letters." There's no proof of a curse, but the park gets enough returned rocks that it keeps a pile of them.

The wood itself is about 225 million years old. Back then, this part of Arizona sat near the equator, and huge trees grew along rivers in a hot, wet forest.

When the trees fell, floods carried them into the river channels and buried them under mud and volcanic ash. Cut off from air, they couldn't rot.

Instead, water carrying dissolved minerals seeped in and slowly replaced the wood with quartz, one cell at a time. Iron and other minerals colored it red, yellow, purple, and blue.

Today the logs lie scattered across the ground, some more than 30 meters long. The park holds one of the largest collections of petrified wood on Earth.

The northern end of the park reaches into the Painted Desert, a stretch of badlands striped in red, pink, orange, and lavender. The colors come from the same kinds of minerals that stained the wood.

People have lived here for at least 13,000 years. Around 1250, Ancestral Puebloan farmers built a village of about 100 rooms on a bluff above the Puerco River.

That village is called Puerco Pueblo, and its walls are still standing. Nearby, another small pueblo called Agate House was built entirely out of blocks of petrified wood.

President Theodore Roosevelt made the area a national monument in 1906, one of the first in the country. Congress upgraded it to a national park in 1962.

Walk the Crystal Forest loop, where the logs sparkle with quartz crystals up close. Visit Puerco Pueblo and look for the petroglyphs carved on the rocks nearby, including one that marks the summer solstice with a beam of light. Stop at the Painted Desert Inn, a restored 1920s building that once served travelers on Route 66.