Dispatches From the Parks: Petrified Forest National Park

Amidst the northeastern deserts of Arizona is a geologically and historically significant area that is protected by the National Park Service. Petrified Forest National Park preserves a wide variety of interesting oddities including a Trassic era fossil field, the route of the historic tourist road, Route 66, a series of geological badlands and, the park’s namesake, petrified forests. This may seem like a lot to take in, but the park has done a great job of connecting all of these features together so you can get a lot from just a day’s visit.

I traveled to this park for my spring break and honestly had a confusing journey here. Having traveled here from New Mexico and through the Navajo Nation made it difficult to determine what time it was as New Mexico, the Navajo Nation and Arizona (where the park is located) all observe different time zones. Thus I arrived at the park earlier than expected and still don’t understand how I did it. Ultimately, I spent two days in the park and my journey here began at the Painted Desert Visitor Center.

The Painted Desert Visitor Center is right next to the park’s northern entrance. Being directly off of Interstate 40, it’s also the park’s most visited of its two visitor centers. The visitor center, though, is rather disappointing with just one information desk and a small gift shop that pales in comparison to the gift shop run by the Petrified Forest Trading Company (a National Park Service licensed vendor) right across the walkway. The Petrified Forest Trading Company building also contains the Painted Desert Diner, the park’s only full scale restaurant within its boundary. I went here for dinner the first day and lunch the second day and both times I had to get the Navajo taco, which is the local delicacy here. The Navajo taco is essentially all of the usual taco fixings on top of some Navajo fry bread, which makes it rather hard to eat by hand. If you listened to our podcast on our travels to Badlands National Park, you will know this is not the first time I’ve had a Navajo taco before. This made it extremely hard not to compare my experiences at the Petrified Forest’s Painted Desert Diner and the Badland’s Cedar Pass Lodge. My time at the Painted Desert was an all-around much more enjoyable experience. The food was slightly better, and the diner also had a range of local hot sauces that you could choose from to add to your meal. The diner surroundings itself were also vastly superior as the building was much cleaner and had a distinctive blue and orange color scheme that made it quite memorable (so memorable that I later had to buy a trucker hat in the gift shop with a matching color scheme). The restaurant also has the official park video playing on repeat in the dining area, which in ways made it more informative than the visitor center itself.

The biggest drawing attraction for the park is its auto tour road, which runs from its northern to southern entrances. The northern entrance begins with numerous overlooks that can get repetitive pretty quickly even if you are enticed by the openness of the surroundings at first. An early highlight is the Tiponi Point Overlook, which is actually the first overlook you will come across if driving from the northern entrance. This overlook has vast views, but also a #FindYourPark wayside exhibit that is a remnant of the National Park Service’s centennial campaign. The next major highlight on the auto tour road is the Painted Desert Inn. The inn is not active anymore, but there are still a lot of cool things to do and see here. Most of the inn has been converted into a museum that shows you what it was like to visit here during the Route 66 era. The old diner room is the highlight with an old school menu and movie posters on full display. The park also has Navajo craftspeople come in and do demonstrations, which was ongoing in the lobby when I visited. The lobby has a fantastic painted glass ceiling. The bottom floor of the inn is now a creamery, so I had to stop and get some ice cream. Great views of the valley are right outside of the creamery.

As you get about a third of the way through the auto tour the overlooks begin to spread out. However, the overlooks do get more interesting. The first in this section of the tour road is Newspaper Rock. The rock has some really well preserved petroglyphs that you can see with the naked eye as it sits right below an elevated platform that the park has put in place for its protection. Once you get to the Blue Mesa area in the park’s southern section, you will finally start to see the park’s namesake in abundance. For some reason the petrified trees are tough to find in the park’s northern half. Blue Mesa is a section of badlands that in the right light actually appear as if they are composed of blue sand. I didn’t notice it until I hit a section of the auto tour road that was covered by the right mix of cloud and sun. The Blue Mesa also has an interesting hike at the center of its loop road that brings you right into an oasis of badlands and petrified trees making for one of the more interesting experiences that you can have in the park on your feet. Another great place to see petrified trees is in Crystal Forest. This happened to be my first hike and first up close introduction to the park’s namesake. It’s right off the tour road and it’s oriented in such a way that you can go as far as you like on the trail and still get up close to the petrified trees.

At the southern end of the park sits Rainbow Forest Visitor Center. This is a much higher class visitor center than its northern brethren. So if you only have time for one make sure it’s this one.The visitor center has a very detailed museum on triassic era fossils (if you’ve seen the old school BBC Walking With Dinosaurs documentary a lot of the names in the museum will be familiar to you) as well as much more detail about the petrified forests. Multiple hikes lead straight from the visitor center. I chose the Giant Logs Trail, which passes by some of the most photographed petrified trees in the park. Your experience in the park will ultimately end with the odd instance of having to go through a brief security check at the entrance station as they want to make sure people aren’t leaving the park with any petrified wood or fossils. Despite that odd protocol, Petrified Forest National Park is still a can’t miss experience.