Petrified Forest: Two Hundred Ninety-Four Million Years and What Came After

About two hundred twenty five million years ago, the landscape you are looking at was a tropical forest near the equator. None of the familiar geography existed yet. No Atlantic Ocean. No Rocky Mountains. No Colorado Plateau. The land sat low and swampy, covered by tall conifers, ferns, and freshwater reptiles. Then the trees fell into rivers, were buried under sediment before they could decompose, and were slowly replaced mineral by mineral with quartz. Over two hundred million years, the sediment that buried them was lifted by geological forces and then eroded away, until the stone logs lay on the surface of the high desert, visible from a road built in the nineteen twenties.

Route Sixty-Six ran directly through what is now the Petrified Forest. The original alignment is still visible inside park boundaries, marked and interpretively signed by the National Park Service. Ancestral Pueblo peoples occupied portions of this landscape for centuries, leaving petroglyphs on the painted desert surfaces that visitors can see at Newspaper Rock within the park. A documented Navajo presence in this corridor extends through the Long Walk era.

The park has one of the highest documented rates of artifact theft of any National Park Service site. An estimated twelve tons of petrified wood is removed illegally each year, a figure drawn from weight comparisons of parcels sent in by visitors who later experienced remorse, sometimes years after the fact. The park maintains a collection of these returned pieces. Some come with letters. People describe bad luck, guilt, and dreams. The wood is about two hundred twenty five million years old. It does not care. But the deposits are finite and the theft is real, and the forest is getting smaller.