Painted hill and petrified wood (week 4)
After three nights and all the ups and downs of Sedona, we very merrily packed up for a detour east to the Petrified Forest and Painted Hills National Park.
It was an interesting place, not as stunning as many of the others we'd seen, but a worthwhile detour nonetheless. We spent most of the day moving through the park and going on short hikes. Petrified wood is oddly beautiful, and it can feel like it's playing a trick on the senses. A koan: Is it a tree, or is it a rock? It looks like wood on the outside, but is made of various shades of quartz, sometimes with pretty miniature crystals in deep set crevices. Of course, it's technically rock - but it wouldn't have existed without the tree.
The trees covered this portion of Pangaea around 225 million years ago, when what would become Arizona was still covered in tropical rainforest. The trees lucky enough to get buried in silt may have crystallized, then were slowly unearthed through erosion over millions of years. The coloured layers of the painted hills are like the rings of the trees, each layer representing a different era. They believe that a thin rust coloured layer may have been caused by an impact crater which is now known as lake Manicouagan, in Quebec.
Onwards! We had one more week to get to Los Angeles to visit our friends, and a rare desert bloom to catch in the Mojave and Colorado deserts of southern California…
It was an interesting place, not as stunning as many of the others we'd seen, but a worthwhile detour nonetheless. We spent most of the day moving through the park and going on short hikes. Petrified wood is oddly beautiful, and it can feel like it's playing a trick on the senses. A koan: Is it a tree, or is it a rock? It looks like wood on the outside, but is made of various shades of quartz, sometimes with pretty miniature crystals in deep set crevices. Of course, it's technically rock - but it wouldn't have existed without the tree.
The trees covered this portion of Pangaea around 225 million years ago, when what would become Arizona was still covered in tropical rainforest. The trees lucky enough to get buried in silt may have crystallized, then were slowly unearthed through erosion over millions of years. The coloured layers of the painted hills are like the rings of the trees, each layer representing a different era. They believe that a thin rust coloured layer may have been caused by an impact crater which is now known as lake Manicouagan, in Quebec.
Onwards! We had one more week to get to Los Angeles to visit our friends, and a rare desert bloom to catch in the Mojave and Colorado deserts of southern California…