Also on our route was Petrified Forest National Park, so we stopped again to explore and of course let the kids earn their Junior Ranger badges. (They're running out of room!)
We all agreed this place was WAY cooler than its name. We propose it be renamed to Southwestern Badlands and Painted Desert with a Petrified Forest Inside National Park. Maybe a bit long? This is a panorama of 3 pics (gotta love Photomerge in Photoshop)!
Parts were like the SD Badlands, others like the John Day Painted Hills of OR, then the petrified trees were new to us. The views were amazing and the hills and trees very colorful due to the different kinds of minerals. We learned about the colors and how the trees came to be there. (As expected in a national park, they claimed theory as fact and said the trees were 225 million years old, which is completely plausible - if you ignore things like the 1950s boot found with a petrified human foot inside of course.) But as always, these thousands of years old petrified trees were indeed beautiful and fun to see! As rock now, they just break off in chunks, so it looks like some logger was just there chopping wood.
Here are a few of our favorite pics:
And more of course:
Very, very interesting place!
We all agreed this place was WAY cooler than its name. We propose it be renamed to Southwestern Badlands and Painted Desert with a Petrified Forest Inside National Park. Maybe a bit long? This is a panorama of 3 pics (gotta love Photomerge in Photoshop)!
Parts were like the SD Badlands, others like the John Day Painted Hills of OR, then the petrified trees were new to us. The views were amazing and the hills and trees very colorful due to the different kinds of minerals. We learned about the colors and how the trees came to be there. (As expected in a national park, they claimed theory as fact and said the trees were 225 million years old, which is completely plausible - if you ignore things like the 1950s boot found with a petrified human foot inside of course.) But as always, these thousands of years old petrified trees were indeed beautiful and fun to see! As rock now, they just break off in chunks, so it looks like some logger was just there chopping wood.Here are a few of our favorite pics:
And more of course: Very, very interesting place!
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