A Snapshot and The Scoop: Changing Boundaries

Petrified Forest National Park is an excellent example of the conservation of culturally significant lands being protected in stages as more research is done, land is surveyed, and the public voice is heard. What started out as a small piece of land preserving a tiny portion of an ancient forest turned to stone soon grew to include more of the forest, protecting it from looters and those intent on making a buck off of something that everyone should have a right to enjoy. Public lands are everyone's to enjoy and should be protected as such. The boundaries of Petrified Forest National Park grew in leaps and bounds, soon preserving not only the piece of desert viewable by car, but farther on, accessible to those who seek the solitude of a trail. It is things like this that a park should protect for everyone to to enjoy, not redact to help line someone's pocketbook or to prove a petty point.

Leave me a comment and tell me about another park that has expanded its boundaries since it was first designated. I can think of a few just in my lifetime, including Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve!

A Snapshot and The Scoop: Agate Bridge

The 110 foot ancient petrified log that is now Agate Bridge is part of Petrified Forest National Park, located in the Painted Desert of Arizona. This log was once part of a lush forest now preserved as colorful rock in an imitation of the wood it once was. The "bridge" was formed by water carving away the softer sandstone rock that lay underneath the log, and in the early days of the park a concrete support was placed underneath the log to help preserve the bridge. Their work is already fading away; water in the desert is a force to be reckoned with and will eventually cause the log to fall, making Agate Bridge no more.

Leave me a comment below and tell me if you've had the pleasure of seeing Agate Bridge. Have you visited this National Park?

An Ode to the Painted Desert

Dazzled. I know what you're thinking: Another desert post?? Guys, I can't help it. The desert calls to me, it fascinates me, it makes my heart happy in a way nowhere else does. And it is different anywhere you go. You can have the soaring red and white cliffs of southern Utah, the golden sand dunes of central Colorado, the parched scrub-brush lands of Wyoming, and many other variations of desert, which is only a broad definition of a place that doesn't get a lot of moisture. And, of course, there's the Painted Desert.

The Painted Desert, a vast region stretching through central Arizona, is partially protected in various national parks, monuments, and state parks, such as Petrified Forest National Park and Wupatki National Monument. In these parks are prime examples of the exposed clay and sand that give the Painted Desert its name. Blues and purples in colors that seem to be from an artist's brush sweep across your field of vision, until you crest the next bluff and look down on mesas banded with corals and pinks. Deep burgundy hills give way to the green of oxidized copper, while whites and blacks wash through everything.

It's a toss up for me, whether I prefer to see the desert from among the hills and dunes or from above. Up high, on a bluff or plateau, you can see how the desert expands around you, the colors blending in to each other, bleeding from one shade to the next. Among the hills, though, along the canyon bottoms and the washes, you get the banding of the colors, the lines that separate one color from the next, and each individual grain has a unique shade to it. Oh, and the light! How the light plays on the desert can change its mood and colors from dawn until dusk. One hour you can have glowing golden walls, the next they are a flat orangish-tan, and then again they could be streaked dark with the moisture from a rare desert shower. You just can't get that anywhere else.

So yes, this is *another* desert post. And no, I'm not going to apologize for it. There's plenty more where that came from.

A Forest of Stone

Fascinated. On our last full day of exploring the desert back in May my sister and I had the chance to get ourselves to Petrified Forest National Park. Now, I say "had the chance" for a reason. My sister and I have both tried twice to see Petrified Forest in the past and have both been thwarted by weather. The first time we tried we were with our family on our first two-week long summer vacation where we loaded up in my dad's truck, towed our pop-up camper behind us, and set off for the desert southwest. It was my first time seeing the desert, and it was that trip that sparked my love for it. I can't even count how many times I've been back since that first trip in the early 2000's. That first trip we had stopped at Petrified Forest National Park and I can't remember much about it, other than the storm. We got caught in one of the monsoon rains that crash across the desert in high summer, dumping buckets of rain accompanied by flashes of lightning and peals of thunder. I don't remember anything about the park other than that storm, trying to take shelter from it under a metal picnic pavillion with my dad, while Mom, Lisha, and little Austin ran for the car.

Alisha and Austin tried to visit the park a couple summers ago and ran into the monsoon rains yet again, cutting their stay in the park short because it wasn't safe to be outside. You are literally the tallest thing around. I tried to go myself on my desert adventure during the winter of 2016, and had made it to the park entrance before I was stopped short and turned back; a blizzard was tearing across the park from north to south, and it was headed straight for me. The rangers had closed the gates to the park and told me it was best if I found a place to stay put for a couple days while the storm blew itself out. My sister and I finally had good weather as we drove through Arizona on our way home from our Grand Canyon Adventure, and we had no reason not to stop. 

Petrified Forest National Park preserves an ancient forest of giant trees that fell, got buried, and instead of rotting over time filled with minerals that took on the shape of wood. The logs in the pictures of this post are all rocks, not wood. Most of them are very well preserved, right down to the details of the tree-rings, but filled with colors more brilliant than any living wood. Petrified Wood is one of the most colorful rocks in the world, and that plus the fact that it is wood turned in to rock makes it a high target for collection. Collecting and removing petrified wood from within park boundaries is highly illegal, but that doesn't stop people from trying, unfortunatley. There are signs everywhere and volunteers and rangers at checkpoints to make sure visitors leave the rocks where they belong. If everybody who visits the park took a piece of rock home with them there would be none left for future visitors to enjoy. 

Alisha and I spent several hours in the park, walking the shorter trails on feet that were still healing from our trek across the Grand Canyon and taking in the views of the desert littered with chucks of petrified wood. There was hardly a cloud in the sky and the temperature at the end of May was not yet unbearable, making for a perfect afternoon to take in the beauty that surrounded us. No storms in sight.