# 141 Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona Crystal Forest Gift Shop

Our next stop was the petrified forest national park and didn't know what to expect. I think when I was watching the documentary on the National Parks it talked about how John Muir simply falling in love with the place. I assumed it would kind of be like a bunch of logs all over the place for probably a 10 or 20-mile stretch.

I think about without even looking at the history books what happened would probably be like a modern-day log jam. I imagined a big giant forest and river system and a massive log jam one day became covered with mud then became petrified. That might explain why they're concentrated here and nowhere else. One day I need to read up on it and find out the facts. Visiting here was so cool so we found a really neat place to stay.

The Boondock was advertised to be in the parking lot of a gift shop. I think it was about $10 but it had electricity but no water spigot at the site but nearby. The Boondock itself was just before the official entrance of the National Park. I sensed the petrified forest was sacred. But just outside of the boundary there was a ton of petrified wood for sale. Most seemed to be operated by native people. It appeared that having most of it protected is great but if it just happens to be on your private land it's not so sacred.

That felt a little weird.

We stayed at this boondock for two nights. The first night you get there and get set up and just kind of take a breath. The next day will be for nosing around and then trying to explore the place. The park really just turns into a long drive and you pull over and park at six or so different locations. These all have trails and stuff and it was all very pretty. The first part was all 100 percent petrified wood.

Painted dessert

The second part was called the Painted Desert. It was just crazy cool kind of like Badlands only a lot of red and pink rock formations. I liked it quite a bit for the beauty.

At the very end of it, there was a cool old hotel-type thing that was on the old route 66 path.

I believe what happened is they rerouted route 66 around the National Park instead of through it. At some point, it became gobbled up by highway 40 a while back. Originally route 66 ran right through the petrified forest and this was the cool old hotel there and cafe people used to rest their eyes.

I certainly took plenty of pictures of it. The skylights and the light fixtures are all handcrafted and just as pretty as can be. Laying on the ground there was a lot of Native American art and so forth. It was was just a nice experience, One of the stops was the cool petroglyph area. One of the large slabs was called newspaper rock. It was covered with what seemed like a hundred storytelling petroglyph drawings. We found ourselves at the end of the scenic part at an I-40 exit. We went back west on 40 through a small town named Hollister where you turned left to get back to the gift shop.

Newspaper rock

This guy popped out to say hey as soon as we started our hike

I don't know what to call these but they seemed cool