Petrified Forest National Park

Our trip to Petrified Forest National Park and our first trip into badlands would be a memorable one. These badlands were special -- sprinkled with half-buried treasure -- petrified wood.

I have two memories from my youth regarding petrified wood. I remember seeing a large piece somewhere when I was very young -- maybe in DC on a trip to the Smithsonian. I also had a small piece that I had either found or was given to me for my rock and mineral collection. In the intervening years I have spent delightfully unaware of a massive cache in the Arizona desert. These examples were more beautiful than any I've ever seen.

We started on the scenic drive from the South -- in intermittent rain. We squeezed in a few short walks in between showers -- one, through an ancient log jam, and another, to a pueblo house, of which we had recently seen many fine examples. This one, like all the others, was built of the material at hand -- in this case, petrified wood.

As we continued our scenic drive we were beginning to become slightly concerned about our plans to spend the next two nights in the wilderness -- which looked like we might be starting in the rain.

By the time we got to the visitor center though, the rain did stop and the sun came out, reassuring a trepidant Vitali. However, once we stepped foot inside the visitor center, our hopes quickly faded. The ranger talking to us seemed pretty certain that we would have a miserable time and would need to 'Be prepared for self-rescue!' What?? If I could self-rescue I wouldn't need rescuing?

We asked if we could get a good idea of conditions out in the wilderness on the trail and the ranger said yes, that should be indicative, so away we went to test. The trail, luckily, seemed fine -- no mud, so we went back and picked up the permit. The guy giving out the actual permits assured us if we needed to actually be rescued we would be.

By the time we had done all this though, it had started to rain again, hard. We sat in the car for awhile waiting for it to stop but eventually gave up and decided to come out the next morning.

We started the hike in around 8am (why not?) the next day and ended up hiking about 3 miles into the Painted Desert and found a nice flat spot with no biologic soil crust and set up camp. It also happened that the spot we found was surrounded by petrified wood! One interesting trick of perception is that everything seemed very far away, but in reality, was much closer than expected. The geometry and texture of badlands look like mountains that are far in the distance -- but they are actually very close.

We wandered around for a bit, looking for a way over to the next wilderness zone, where the badlands were red, instead of white. We were also looking for the Onyx Bridge (an exceptionally long, unbroken trunk of petrified wood), but couldn’t find it. After leaving the park we saw an article that the bridge had collapsed earlier this year -- so we did see it, but didn't recognize it. We didn't want to trample any soil crust so we never made it over to the red badlands either...

By the time we got back to camp it was lunch time and was starting to get hot... and we quickly realized the dearth of shade providing objects... We were several million years too late for trees; no bushes or even large rocks. The air temp that day was maybe 80, but boy did it feel a lot higher than that -- and inside the tent was worse, even with the fly removed. We finally found a drainage that had about 18" of shade. We sat there for a few hours and contemplated our current situation.

We survived the heat of the day, made dinner, and went to bed. That night was a full moon, and it was extraordinarily bright, as well as silent. No crickets, coyotes, small animals... nothing! Vitali wondered -- why were we even here?

I woke up in the middle of the night with the worst dehydration headache I've had in a long time. We carried in 12L for 24 hours and we were drinking it -- but apparently not enough. I was getting ready to throw myself off a cliff but Vitali got me some ibuprofen from our first aid kit and after awhile the headache abated and I fell back asleep.

The next morning dawned, beautifully desolate -- our only companions the trunks of trees long dead. The hike back out was uneventful -- the Painted Desert Inn up on the mesa served as a landmark that you could see for miles, and was very helpful in navigating back. Those 24 hours in the Painted Desert were a very hot, very boring (at times), jaunt into badlands that will color our expectations of badlands for the rest of the trip!