A Desert and a Forest

Last Thursday was another day visiting national parks, this time the Petrified Forest NP which includes the Painted Desert. Both, in different ways, were breathtaking experiences. The realisation that what is now desert was once prehistoric swampland and forest became more imaginable when we looked at the square mile after square mile of petrified wood spread across the landscape.
Whole trees had been slowly transformed into quartz and though the area had been used as a source of building material by Pueblo people in the past they made no great impact on the petrified trees. There were still masses of stone trees almost sprinkled like broken and discarded giant matchsticks on top of the sand. It was only when in the 19th Century that opportunist souvenir hunters and traders who made good livings taking the petrified wood out of the area by the wagon load started to impact on the 'wood'. The government created the park in 1906. to start to preserve the area.
Further on the road goes up from the remains of the prehistoric forest, scrub and brush takes over until suddenly we drove over a ridge and saw a huge pink and red and yellow depression in the earth which seemed to go for almost ever. This was the Painted Desert. The colours which are produced by the prescence of different minerals in the sand and rock structures change colour through out the day and to take advantage of this tourist opportunity a local homesteader, Herbert Lore, built a lodge in 1924 to water, feed and provide a bed for the night for intrepid motorists who made their way out into the wilderness. And all this before any roads into this part of Arizona had been built. For $2-$4 a night they could stay in the inn, eat sandwiches or steaks and sit in the downstairs bar and look at the changing desert below them. Herbert Lore also offered his own car drives through the desert so that his visitors could better see the natural phenomenon. His Desert Inn was reopened as a ranger station and information centre in 2006 and it overlooks one of the understandably most popular view points in the park. We got there just after a bus full of high school students from Spartanburg, South Carolina on a cross American trip had stopped just ahead of us. The peace and tranquility of the moment was obviously lost but instead we were granted the opportunity of seeing an unusual way of taking a group picture in front of one of Nature's marvels in this part of Arizona.