The first big stop on our journey to Arizona was at Petrified Forest National Park. I'd heard of it, but never thought much about it until I saw it happened to be on the way anyway, so of course we stopped. We were impressed. It wasn't an overly large park, but there were a lot of cool things to see and check out. Apparently, quite some time ago, there was a big forest in this now desolate part of the world. These once massive trees fell to the ground, were buried by the water and dirt, and somehow that I don't fully understand, turned to stone. It was almost unreal, because it literally looked like ancient loggers had been there, cutting down trees, sawing them in chunks, and sometimes scattering pieces about. Parts of it looked like there had been a giant wood chipper sending chunks of rocky wood all over the otherwise smooth, sandy landscape. We took a few short hikes and drove through the whole park. They made sure to tell everyone that it's illegal to take any of the wood, because it was definitely tempting. Back in the day, people apparently used to haul it all off, but the National Park was created to protect it from that. But there's so much of it in the surrounding areas that we were able to find a pretty big petrified wood store outside the park and bought some souvenir, uh, rocks... for ourselves. The pictures online don't do this place justice... check it out:
This old car and some telephone poles is all that remains of the once fabled Route 66 that ran from Chicago to Los Angeles, passing right through the park. Tourists used to roll through Arizona in cars like this... I'll bet it was hot in the summertime without AC. The weather was perfect for us... even after it rained and snowed on the drive up.
Kind of hard to see here, but the dunes were often blue and almost purple in color.
Looks like you could throw it in your campfire... not sure it'd burn though.
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