Wednesday 10/19 Petrified Forest and Painted Desert.   Arizona is home to some of the prettiest petrified wood.  It is called rainbow petrified wood.  We all know that petrified wood logs are remnants of prehistoric forests, but I really never knew how colorful these could be.  In some areas of the park, the fossilized trunks are scattered all over, but many more are still hidden beneath the surface.  These logs date back to the late Triassic Period, making them millions of years old!  Incredible!  We were told that the brilliant colors are due to trace minerals that soaked into the wood along with silica and volcanic ash.  All of these crystallized and replaced the wood, which is now stone.

Old Faithful

We hiked up the Giant Logs Trail to see "Old Faithful " which is a giant log, 35 ft long, weighs 44 tons, and is 10 ft across it's base.  Many of the logs in the park are scattered around the "badlands".  Badlands, we learned, is an area of soft rock strata that is cut and eroded into many gullies and irregular shapes where vegetation cannot grow.  They are starkly beautiful, even if they are barren of any plant life.  

Then we hiked for another mile around the Crystal Forest that is an area in which the logs sparkle in the sunlight along with the rainbow colors.

We moved on to Blue Mesa where the badlands areas are tinged with blue and lavender stripes.

We saw Agate Bridge, a 110 foot long petrified wood bridge.

At Newspaper Rock, we were, again, able to see petroglyphs .  These petroglyphs are over 2,000 years old.

Finally, we finished up at the Painted Desert.  This is a perfect name .  It truly looks like someone used a giant paintbrush to paint the pyramid-shaped bluffs and mesas.  The landscape is all soft shades of pink and orange, yellow, lavender, and green.  Beautiful!