Painted Desert, from the Grand Canyon to the Petrified Forest National Park
The
Painted Desert is an area of breathtaking beauty, stretching along the
Little Colorado River from the Grand Canyon to the Petrified Forest
National Park in Northern Arizona. The desert, named 'el Desierto
Pintura' by the Spaniards, because of its brightly colored land forms,
consists of badland hills and Chime Formation rocks as well as
spectacular mesas and buttes rising from the desert floor.
The Painted Desert's rocks and soils have various combinations of
minerals and decayed plant and animal matter that contribute to the many
colors, particularly the red rocks, throughout the formations. At
sunrise and sunset, the crimson formations are especially beautiful when
they turn shades of violet, blue and burnt orange.
The park changes continually and winds shift the sediments, causing lower
layers of fossil and petrified wood to surface, most notably the
220-million-year-old remains of a conifer forest from the Triassic Period
Petrified Forest.
Geologically similar to many other parks of the Colorado Plateau, this
was once a vast floodplain, crossed by many streams and filled with an
abundance of stately pines. Covered by silt, mud and volcanic ash, the
trees' oxygen supply was cut off, slowing the logs' decay. Gradually,
silica-bearing ground waters seeped through the logs and slowly encased
the original tissues with silica deposits. Over time, the silica
crystallized into quartz, and the logs were preserved as petrified wood.
The Petrified Forest National Park is home to the largest example of this
phenomenon in the world.
Short hikes will take you through this spectacular scenery. One outlook
offers views of Newspaper Rock, a huge sandstone block covered with
petroglyphs. In the Blue Mesa area, you will find pedestal logs acting as
capstones to the soft clays beneath.
The Flattops, massive remnants of a once continuous layer of sandstone
capping parts of this area, protect the layered deposits long eroded from
other parts of the park. From here you can also access the Long Logs
trail, part of Rainbow Forest. Iron, carbon, manganese and other minerals
color the petrified wood.
