The Petrified Forest National Park includes a 28 mile road through the heart of the park, showcasing the Painted Desert, the world’s largest and most colorful concentration of petrified wood, various hiking options from easy to challenging, over 13,000 years of human history, fossils that reach back to the Triassic Period, and habitat for hundreds of desert plant and animal species.
Things to See in the Park
The Painted Desert Visitor Center is located at the northern end of the park and is open daily to offer information and amenities.
Rainbow Forest Museum
The Rainbow Forest Museum and the surrounding complex was a project of the Civilian Conservation Core in the mid 1930s. It’s located at the southern end of the park.
The Rainbow Forest Museum is at the south end of the park just off of Hwy 180. The museum exhibits include prehistoric animals and petrified wood. There is also a free film about the park and how petrified wood is created. It plays every half hour.
The Painted Desert Inn
The Painted Desert Inn was built in the mid 1920s. People were able to get off of Route 66 and stop somewhere, get a bite to eat, and spend a night in the hotel. In the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Core began constructing several projects including the renovation of the Painted Desert Inn and the development of the Rainbow Forest Complex.
The Painted Desert Inn is now a museum and National Historic Landmark. It features a series of large murals painted by celebrated Hopi Indian artist and educator, Fred Kabotie.
They depict his visual stories of different aspects of life in the southwest.
Painted Desert Overlooks
The Painted Desert overlooks are on the north side of the park near the Painted Desert Inn. This is where the Painted Desert Rim Trail begins.
Tawa Point – Tawa Point is a pull off about a mile south of the northern park entrance at Interstate 40.
Katchina Point has some wonderful views of the red, orange, pink, and purple rocks of the Painted Desert.
Route 66 Alignment
The Petrified Forest is the only national park to preserve a piece of Historic Route 66 passing through it. It’s marked by a historical marker and an old 1930s Studebaker Car.
Route 66 went through the heart of the Painted Desert from 1926 to 1958 and was the primary way millions of travelers initially experienced the Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert.
The only remnants of the road that remain are a line of telephone poles that once stood alongside the roadway.
Puerco Pueblo
The Puerco Pueblo was a village consisting of over 100 rooms that formed a one-story apartment complex surrounding a central plaza in the village. The building materials for the pueblo were blocks of native sandstone, shaped by hand, and mortared together with mud. The exterior and interior walls were finished with plaster.
The structures above ground served as living quarters and storage rooms. There were also several subterranean rooms, or kivas. Kivas are ceremonial and religious structures. These likely had flat roofs with a square entrance above a hearth. As the smoke rose through the entrance, fresh air was drawn in through a small ventilation shaft.
The plaza was the center of activity in the village. By examining artifacts and structures found at Puerco Pueblo and their context, researchers are able to reconstruct the daily life of its inhabitants. Everyday tasks such as the preparation of food or the manufacture of tools, pottery, and baskets occurred in this space. In addition, ceremonial activities took place within these walls that tied the community of Puerco to their ancestors and to their neighbors in the region.
Newspaper Rock
Newspaper Rock contains more than 650 petroglyphs etched into it’s boulders. It offers a glimpse what life might have been like for the people that lived here in the Puerco River Valley over 2,000 years ago.
Blue Mesa
Blue Mesa is a significant landform located on a spur road halfway through the Petrified Forest National Park. The road (~5 miles round trip) goes on top of the mesa with scenic overlooks of the landscape, badlands, trail, and hoodoos.
The trailhead for Blue Mesa Trail is located halfway around the loop road at a sunshelter. The mesa consists of the Blue Mesa and Sonsela Members with petrified wood deposits. Spectacular views of blue, purple, gray, and peach banded badlands.
Agate Bridge
Water created the Agate Bridge and will eventually destroy it. The fossilized tree that now forms Agate Bridge grew in a lush subtropical forest 217 million years ago. When this tree died, it washed into a river and its quick burial by river sediments prevented decay.
Volcanic ash dissolved in groundwater provided silica, which reacted with the log and slowly crystallized it into quartz. Millions of years later, rivers and streams eroded massive layers of rock strata to expose this fossilized tree. Inevitably, water now carving the small gully under Agate Bridge will cause its collapse. The supportive concrete span underneath it, constructed in 1917, is a tenuous attempt at preservation. Water will eventually have its way.
Jasper Forest
Jasper Forest contains one of the largest accumulations of petrified wood in the world. Originally called the “First Forest”, this site was the first petrified wood site available to railroad travelers in the early 1900s. All around are pieces of logs that were once encased in surrounding sandstone. A visitor in 1917 wrote, “It was six miles to Forest #1. It was well worth the trip though for it is a wonderful sight…The ground was covered with broken pieces…of the high & bright colored stuff.”
Although Jasper Forest is no longer a visitor’s first stop, you can still see the same impressive sights, wonder at the vast deposits of colorful wood, and retrace the steps of those bygone travelers.
Crystal Forest
Crystal Forest was a lush, green forest… 218 million years ago. Today it’s a semi-arid grassland in the Petrified National Forest. During the Triassic Period, Crystal Forest was part of the Pangea supercontinent at approximately 10 degrees north of the equator… about where present day Costa Rica is located. As Pangea broke apart, the North American continent drifted northward.
Fast forward 218 million years and Crystal Forest is at 35 degrees north latitude. The Colorado Plateau lifted slowly over millions of years, raising the park land about a mile above sea level. Had Crystal Forest not moved and uplifted, it would still be a forest, much like the rain forest of Costa Rica.
Long Logs & Agate House
Agate House is located near Rainbow Forest.
