Painted Desert Arizona

Photo: Painted Desert in Arizona

Santa Fe, NM to Flagstaff, AZ – It’s all about Petrified Wood…

For All photos of the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest – click here!

We had a lazy morning in Santa Fe, enjoying brunch (green chilis of course) and a walk around some of the galleries and shops of old town. One gallery we stopped at was rather inspiring to me. A whole gallery of world photography. As I wandered around the space, I knew so many of the places in the photos because they were all places I had been in my travels around the world. In fact, there were even some of the same shots in Morocco that I took. I was really reminded of my enthusiasm for this type of photography – cultural, global photography. Sure, it’s fun to photograph landscapes, but I really love the candid cultural shots, the ones that tell a story, that evoke a feeling – and that’s what this gallery did for me – provided feeling again. The gallery visit stuck in my head all afternoon, making me think of what I really wanted to do with my life, providing me a little push in the right direction. I needed that.

We had a long highway drive across New Mexico and into Arizona today. Our goal was to make it to Flagstaff where we would stay for the night and conduct our launch for the Grand Canyon the next day. So – it was a pretty standard ‘peddle to the metal’ kind of day. However now since we were in the warmer weather, we happened to run into a lot more construction than what we had previously. But overall, this day was rather tame. Or maybe this was the day that Kathleen and I got sick of each other as I don’t even recall talking about very much in the car. Sure, we talked about the usual – how lame the guy was that we met the night before in the bar…but that’s nothing unusual.

We did plan one stop along the driving into Arizona – the National Petrified Forest and Painted Desert Park. It was a short drive off the hiway, so we thought we might as well take a look. I was excited to flash my new, annual park pass and get out vehicle in for free! This was really the beginning of our adventures in geology that would last for the next 7 days…the whole week of rock formations made me wish I had paid more attention in geology class in high school.

I really didn’t expect much from the painted desert and petrified wood, but it was a great excuse for a break from the interstate and a change of scenery. I was stunned when we drove into the park and took the park’s scenic road (about 27 miles), it was absolutely beautiful. I thought that the colors would most likely be disappointing, but shame on me for being such a pessimist…the colors were stunning. In fact, we had a bright blue sky for a backdrop which made it all the better for photography. This area in Arizona (near Holbrook) used to the home to dinosaurs millions of years ago, it was hard to imagine anything this barren as a fertile, lush jungle at one time.

One of the real draws of the park was the petrified wood. Don’t go there thinking that there will be a forest of petrified trees still standing…or you will be disappointed, instead it’s desert land littered with fragments of petrified wood that now look like marble. The tall, old trees once stood tall…millions of years ago. They were shared space on this earth with dinosaurs…pretty cool stuff. Over millions of years, the trees have been submerged in flooding and volcanic ash, and have eventually become stone…preserved now forever. In their pre-petrified lifetime they fell over at some point and broken into pieces like a tootsie roll. Some of the tree trunks seem completely intact except for the fact that they are lying on the ground as opposed to standing up. In some ways, this Petrified Forest was more impressive to me than some of the ancient sites from around the world. Sure, the Great Pyramids of Egypt were amazing to see…but even they were only 5,000 years old – babies compared to the trees that we saw. The trees are now simply rock formations – but it you look close, you can see the detailed bark, the rings corresponding to years , the coloration and the various textures of the wood.

Click to enlarge

We made a quick stop in Holbrook before getting back on to the interstate. We had heard about a Tepee hotel in Holbrook along Route 66 that was worth stopping to see. Kathleen was rather excited to see the tepees. In fact, she wanted to stay in one of them, but we knew we had to get further that night if we were to make it to the Grand Canyon in the morning. Instead of staying in a tepee, Kathleen talked the owner into letting us at least go look inside one! They weren’t real tepees, instead they were made of stone…no, they were not petrified tepees…yet that would have been pretty cool! The were cute and what made them even more fun was the old cars parked around the parking lot as if you had just stepped back in time when Route 66 was thriving. The owner told us that the cars that we saw parked around the lot were actually the car models that Disney decided to use for the movie Cars. She said that her husbands cars is what inspired Disney to choose the car-characters. I have no way of checking this fact, but I chose to believe it – because all of them were there – the tow truck, the old pickup – it was pretty cool.

I had to tear Kathleen out of the tepee hotel and get back on the road. We made it to Flagstaff and picked the first hotel we found near the interstate, a Howard Johnsons – right near the train tracks….maybe not the best choice! I honestly didn’t think Hojo’s even existed any longer! The train noise didn’t even matter because we were beat from our driving day – full of some surprises.

Off to the Grand Canyon tomorrow!