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Petrified Forest National Park was
another new one for us. Until two years ago, the contest ended
on Thursday at about 2 p.m., and if we were to make it to the Grand Canyon
(or close to it) on Thursday in time to hike in the Canyon on
Friday, we could not stop anywhere along the way between Las Cruces
and the Canyon except for rest stops and to eat.
In 2007, the schedule changed and the
contest ended Wednesday night, which made all day Thursday available
for the long Las Cruces-Grand Canyon drive. Last year we
returned to Phoenix and home on Thursday, having hiked in the Canyon
at the beginning, rather than the end, of the week.
But this year we returned to
end-of-week hiking, so the full day available gave us the chance to
break up the drive with a stop at the Petrified Forest National Park
near Holbrook. We had passed this park on previous trips, but
it was always nighttime by the time we got there, and we wouldn't
have had time to stop, anyway. |
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| $50.00 for 11 of us.
Comes out to less than $5.00 each. Not bad. |
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Cover of the brochure they hand you at the entrance. |
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| The park's newspaper. |
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| You can enter the park either
from an exit right off of Interstate 40 and drive south through it,
coming out at a point along U.S. 180 about 20 miles southeast of
Holbrook, or you can enter at the south end and end up at I-40. We
entered from the north, and this is the entrance. |
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| As the two sides of this
insert in the brochure tell you, they are dead serious about not
removing rocks, petrified wood, or anything else, from the park. |
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| As the park road, which
actually heads north from the exit off of I-40, gradually turns to the
south, you can look out the right side of your car and see into the
Painted Desert. There are several locations along the road to pull
off and take a few pictures. |
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| A picture of us looking at and taking
pictures of the Painted Desert. |
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Emo. In the Petrified Forest no
less. |
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| After having been very windy
most of the day, the weather was perfect and the winds pretty calm
during our mid-afternoon visit. |
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| Most hiking areas had paved
trails. Made it very easy to get around. All those logs
lying around are petrified wood, which gets that way as the wood lays
buried and the cell structure is slowly replaced with minerals. (I
hope I got that right--Geologists everywhere, I apologize.) |
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| More of those petrified
logs. |
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A petrified log still
partially buried. Most of the exposed ones were broken in sections
like this one. It looked as though someone had methodically gone
through them with a chain saw. What's really happening, we think,
is that they break under their own weight, and the glass-like structure
of the petrified wood causes them to break cleanly. (Again,
apologies to geologists everwhere.) |
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| A few of us at another hiking
area near the south entrance. That's the visitor center and gift
shop behind us. |
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| Darin taking a rest before we
pressed on to Flagstaff for dinner. |
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