Day 9: Petrified Forest/Painted Desert, Drive to Page

225 Miles

The Petrified Forest National Park includes the area known as the Painted Desert. The two parts of the park are divided by historic Route 66, which we unknowingly drove on and crossed over several times throughout this leg of our journey. Petrified Forest Road, which runs north-south through the park is about 28 miles long. If you wanted to just drive and take snapshots from the car window, you could see it in under an hour, but that would be a damn shame. There are several viewpoints and hikes of varying difficulty that are well worth getting out of the car for, even on a hot, windy day.

If you start on the north end at the welcome center, you will be given a guide that highlights the best-known features and trails. We simply stopped, at least briefly, at each one and decided whether we wanted to hike or go back to the car to the next point of interest. In all, we spent about seven hours exploring and hiking, eating at the park’s restaurant (I recommend the Hatch green chili cheeseburger and some fry bread), seeing the beautifully restored Painted Desert Inn, hitting the gift shops, and visiting the Rainbow Forest Museum to learn about the geology.

Photos were a bit tricky because it was frequently overcast, but I’m happier with these than I am with the ones from Carlsbad Caverns. 

I’ve never seen anything like this park. Just a few minutes of driving is like time traveling on a geological scale. Multicolored layers of rocky hills and valleys expose the region’s activity across millions of years. One area called “Newspaper Rock” boasts over 600 petroglyphs left by the Pueblo peoples over a period from 600 to 2000 years ago. A few miles north of that is the Blue Mesa Badlands, with a one-mile hiking trail that offers true desert beauty in harsh surroundings. Roughly 220-225 million years old, the Blue Mesa is itself only a short drive from the red sandstone layers visible in the “Petrified Forest Member” of the Painted Desert, which is about ten million years “newer”. Turn a corner and see plants and flowers. Get out and hike three minutes to see purple, red, pink, and black hills. The southern portion of the park is filled with petrified wood that also varies greatly in size and mineral composition. We were glad that we were spending the night only a few hours away in Page, as this was not a place we wanted to rush through.

However, the end came, and we got back on the road. We drove on Route 66 to Winslow (I stood on a corner there), then picked up I-40 again through Flagstaff, and finished at Page, where we would visit the next sites on our list.