One of our first stops on our across country, moving from California to Minnesota, was to the Petrified Forest National Park. The area was not the most aesthetically pleasing to me, but the science behind these hunks of trees, turned rock was kind of fascinating. The Petrified Forest National Park is located just south of the Navajo Nation and within Arizona's Painted Desert. As you can imagine it is very hot and the sunlight beat down hard the day we were visiting.
The name of the National Park sounded as if the trees were somehow scared stiff and turned into stone by something supernatural. We would find out that the process for turning trees into rock actually took over 200 million years or so. The area that now is the Petrified Forest National Park used to be a swampy wetland filled with trees, grasses and dinosaurs. Over time these trees fell, submerged in the swamp and then as result of volcanic activity, were covered with volcanic ash. It was explained to us that the silica in the volcanic ash mixed with the water, seeped into the fibers and pours of these trees and eventually crystalized into micro quartz, turning the entire tree into solid rock. I don't claim to understand all of what was described to us, but seeing is believing. It was cool to look at these fallen trees, which were, lying all around, broken along crystalline lines, yet resembling cut logs, jutting out of the sandy badlands area of the Painted Desert. You could even still see the outline of tree rings in the sections of rock logs lying around.
Just an interesting place to visit, and right up the road from a Meteor Crater, which was also cool.
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