Our first stop (after the visitor’s center) in Arizona was the Petrified Forest National Park. Our first National Park! We’re very excited. We bought our annual pass now because we have big plans to visit lots of other National Parks as we continue west (and then back east, eventually). 

Once inside the Petrified Forest National Park the first few miles of the driveable area are devoted to the beautiful Painted Desert, seen in the photograph above. The view above stretches for miles and miles - the Petrified Forest National Park just recently doubled in size, to more than 200,000 acres.

The Petrified Forest National Park not only preserves the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forests, but also remnants of Native American villages from approximately 1200 AD. The photograph above shows a petroglyph that was carved into the rock depicting scenes of every day life - hunting, farming, etc, etc. There are two great places in the park to view these petroglyphs: Puerco Pueblo (where this photo was taken) and Newspaper Rock.

Above you can see what are known as the Teepees - large badlands (soft clay stone) that stand out from the valley below.

And, last, but not least, is the actual petrified wood that makes up the Petrified Forest, seen here. The petrified wood was wood, but has in the millions of years since it was a tree, turned into rock. From far away it looks like regular wood, but up close it is rock hard and has been colored by the sediment and rock that it was buried in. Very different from anything I’d seen before.