Page 10 of 12
Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona
Let the broken hearts stand as the price you’ve got to pay
The second to last national park I visited on my national park blitz tour was Petrified Forest, a roadside park about halfway between Albuquerque and Flagstaff. It has the geographic advantage of some especially pretty badlands, some beautiful desert views and, most importantly, a large concentration of scattered petrified wood. Over the years and decades a lot of the wood/stone has been taken out of the park and today what is left is strictly guarded through fear, guilt, menacing NPS signage and 1960s cold war Berlin type guard booths that make sure you are petrified wood free before you leave the park. And while I did not steal anything, the park ranger quizzing me on the way out let her guard down and told me that if my car was a mess that I could have stolen all I wanted because they weren't going to the trouble of checking messy cars, an honest answer but one that would have probably made any East German guard cry in shame.
Meanwhile this first picture has little to do with the badlands, the desert or the petrified wood, but does look cool nonetheless. The Painted Desert Inn is an all adobe national historic landmark in a national park but often still a sidebar for impatient visitors halfway to Albuquerque (or Flagstaff) who came all that way to see all that petrified wood in the first place.
Popularized and romanticized in everything from old songs to the Grapes of Wrath to Disney Pixar animated films about an apocalyptic future where all humans and animals have been replaced with a society of talking cars, Route 66 has a solid place in American history and cuts right through (or rather once cut right through) Petrified Forest National Park. There are still multiple sections of the preserved road that parallel I-40 and sections that wind through downtowns or meander across the landscape. However if you wanted to drive from Chicago to the pier in Santa Monica on Route 66 you're out of luck- large sections are now missing or forgotten, just like this stretch through Petrified Forest which has been allowed to once again disappear back into the Arizona desert.
By the time you get to Blue Mesa you've already driven halfway across the park and into a different world. From the overlook, a quick loop trail drops down through the badlands (which have the feel and texture of old weathered asphalt) where a combination of the desert heat and lack of water help you to enjoy the beauty while at the same time allowing you to become distracted enough not to realize that there just isn't all that much blue (or even all that much mesa) in a place that dares to call itself Blue Mesa.
Despite the name and the implied endorsement of such a name by the National Park Service, the awful truth is that Petrified Forest isn't really a forest. Sure there are concentrations of petrified wood, but even then they are not just fragmented but also few and far between. Up close the wood/rock can be devastatingly beautiful and each one feels different from the one you just saw, but often they feel little connection to the landscape and feel more like they were just scattered across the badlands after the fact. Maybe that's an after effect of years and decades of poaching, or maybe its just the effect of a geological reality that caused the land to turn bad and caused the wood to turn to stone.
Just past Winslow, Arizona (where standing on a corner may lead to such a fine sight to see, at least according to Glen Frey and/or Jackson Browne), Meteor Crater (or METEOR CRATER! as the billboards suggest) is a gated private attraction that features, well, a meteor crater. From the parking lot, stairs rise to a visitors center where you can EXPERIENCE THE IMPACT! or, like me, just choose to go and see the crater itself. As an object in the desert landscape, the crater is striking and kind of scary, especially since the 4000 foot wide crater was caused by a meteorite only about 150 feet wide. Still no matter how striking METEOR CRATER! is and no matter how much you EXPERIENCE THE IMPACT!, the one thing that most visitors feel upon leaving is at least some sense that they were ripped off. Sure it's cool and all, but its hard not to think that the $15 admission price (or any admission price actually) might be a bit too much to pay for a place where the only really fun thing to do is to stare at a hole in the ground.
