Our plan had been to leave Walnut Canyon, do a drive through in Winslow to see the famous corner, and then find some free place to camp near the Petrified Forest. But, because we left Walnut Canyon so late, we decided to get to Winslow and call it a day. The Winslow Chamber of Commerce allows RVs to overnight in their parking lot, so once we found that we went shopping and filled the truck, and then went to the Standin’ On The Córner Park for the photo op I’d been waiting for, where I could caption it “Used to be a girl, used to be a flat-bed Ford.” We got the photo and then spent a quiet night in the Chamber of Commerce parking lot, although we were up and out earlier than expected since they were having a street festival the next morning and people started pulling in to set up their tents around 5am and we needed to move to make room.
That turned out to be a good thing, because the Petrified Forest National Park is a full-day drive through if you want to see everything. Going into it, we weren’t sure how much time we’d want to spend because we’ve seen a lot of desert, and Petrified Forest didn’t have any great hiking trails, and we figured petrified wood was just more rocks. We stopped at a museum and gift shop just as we entered the park, and realized how wrong we were. The petrified wood comes in every color of the rainbow, and looks like stained glass when it is cut thin and polished. And, it doesn’t really need much polishing because it’s clear and shiny even in the logs. The other thing I found totally unexpected was that while some of the petrified wood looks like beautifully colored glass, some of it looks like…wood. It’s all rock, but you can see the heart wood, surrounded by the outside layer of wood, surrounded by the bark. Somehow that all turned to stone without rotting. As we walked around the different areas of the park, I kept having to remind myself that we were looking at rocks, not somebody’s wood lot where they had a log delivery to chop up for firewood. I took a ton of pictures, since everything I looked at had some unique fascinating (to me) quality. At the end of the day, I had to admit that it’s a good thing we’re traveling in a camper and trying to keep the weight down, or I would have come home with a lot of rocks.
The dogs got their BARK Ranger certificates at Petrified Wood National Park!
We drove the park from south to north, so we exited through the Painted Desert at the end of the day. I’d really been looking forward to that, but it was a little bit of a letdown after the surprisingly fascinating petrified wood. We were heading back into New Mexico to go to El Morro and El Malpais National Monuments, so we found a place to park in the Cibola National Forest which was on the way there. The next day we realized we should have just driven to El Morro and camped in their free campground, because it wasn’t a much longer drive than where we parked in the National Forest, and the parking place was a little weird. The road is paved and surprisingly busy, and the camping spots are just gravel pull offs on the side of the road, and people were beeping at us all night. We believe it was friendly beeping, but it was still a distraction. And, the pull off was full of garbage, and in the morning we found a recently dead dog someone had thrown over the edge, which we of course found very upsetting. We left the Cibola National Forest with a bad taste in our mouths and headed for El Morro.
