Table of Distances As Shown Over Arizona Highways

Petrified Forests of Arizona

COMPRISING an area of 25,920 acres in five separate tracts, all easily accessible from either Adamana or Holbrook, the Petrified Forests of Arizona present one of the strangest and most beautiful sights in the world.

Countless centuries ago the larger portion of Arizona was believed to have been densely wooded. In the course of ages some cosmic catastrophe felled the gigantic trees and an inland sea swept over them, burying them deep in its sediments.

Other ages came and passed and the sea receded. Then with the settling of the ooze and slime, the forests reappeared, this time in a glowing, permanent form. Out of the darkness came literally the most brilliant aggregation of jewels on the globe. The subtle alchemy of nature had done its work.

Vast deposits of petrified wood, varying from the size of a marble to monster logs more than 200 feet in length, are huddled together in the series of "stone forests" of Apache county. Because of climatic conditions of the districts, any of the forests can be visited any day of the year, under almost ideal conditions.

ALTITUDE 5,700 FEET

The forest consists of the ruins of a former plain having an altitude of about 5,700 feet. This plain has undergone extensive erosion to a maximum depth of about 700 feet and is cut into innumerable ridges, buttes and small mesas, with valleys, gorges and gulches between. The strata consists of alternating bids of clay, shales and massive sandstones.

Petrified logs lie in the greatest profusion on the knolls, buttes and spurs, while the ground seems everywhere to be studded with gems, consisting of broken fragments of all shapes and sizes. The petrified logs do not occur in the same abundance throughout. They are gathered in groups at certain points, while entirely absent at others.

Arizona's petrified forests, scientists agree, are much more ancient than those of Yellowstone National Park, of certain parts of Wyoming and of the Calistoga deposits in California. The difference in their antiquity is many millions of years, geologists agree. There is no other petrified forest in which the wood assumes so many varied colors. Not only are chalcedony, opals and agate found among them, but many approach the condition of jasper and onyx.

This district of Apache county is truly God's acre; but lacking the shrouds for these prehistoric trees live again in adamant and agate of every con-

GLISTEN LİKE JEWELS

ceivable color.

Some of the stone trees still retain their bark. Sometimes even the heart and the cross-sections plainly tell how old they were. Even so, the scene presents endless variety and charm, not the least of which is the setting of surrounding cliffs.

No less than four different Indian tribes have lived here in modern times, one probably related to the present Hopi, another to the Zuni, and the two others unknown. Arrowheads of petrified wood are frequently found within the forest area.

The Petrified Forests are the most puzzling of all of Arizona's Wonderland, the most concentrated area of the earth's greatest natural marvels. One guess may be as good as another about this area. The greatest geologists, the greatest botanists, have tried in vain to solve its mysteries.

The felling process was not as of a freshet or jam, but orderly, as God gave them to grow. They are where they grew, but half a mile or so lower, with the under waste of the earth-tissues that gave them root.

TREES 240 FEET HIGH

In this district, back in the pre-historic days, was a woodland beside which the tallest groves of Maine or Tennessee would be underbrush. They were mostly conifers, but with some willows, cottonwoods or other equivalent deciduous trees.

These forests come to prime. At least there are trees which stood 240 feet high, measured for eternity in stone. Some force laid low these giants perhaps a cyclone, a freshet or a sub mergence. So far as science is concerned, there is no data as to this cause beyond the fact of the recumbent giants. All that is sure is that they fell where they stood, and are there a few million years later. They have not drifted or shifted. Then subsidence, either under the ocean, or at least under the inland sea whose shores are still marked on the peaks and rims of the Mogollon plateau, a little lake of about 300 by 200 miles. It was unquestionably a warm sea. The hundreds of volcanic cones, the mineral springs that still exist, show that a colossal pickling plant was in operation.

Pressure is the first mechanics of preservation. The pneumatic force used to tuck creosote into every sap-cell of a bull-pine sleeper would be as a lover's pinch compared to the incalculable squeeze that translated these million cords of trunk from burnable firewood to an adamant which the patient combustion of Time can never char.

"EMBALMED" FOREST GEMS

Prostrated in full vigor by some resistless force, these great trees were felled in an orderly way, their heads generally to the south.

They were embalmed to perennial gems after they fell. Now, they are cross-cut and dismembered by later shocks; then branches were shorn to litter the ground with kaleidoscopic chips. Even when the full stature of the 200-foot tree is measurable upon the ground, it is rare to find 20 feet in a single section. The fracture is an almost perfect cross-cut, but nothing in human knowledge is more obvious than that these breaks were subsequent to the utter fossilization of the trunks. Anything retaining the merest vestige of ligneous fiber could no more break thus than a live hen could be cracked over the knees to a perfect cross-section, it is pointed out. Equality, the method ends between fractures proved absolute continuity in the process of agatizing.

This prone mesozoic forest sank to where the vast later sediments of the Cretaceon era would wash down upon it, mile-deep, somewhere during the stupendous subsidences of the Jurassic period. In these deep bowels of the earth, the springs of sulphur, iron, copper and salt, paste chalcedony and the solutions of silica still swirled about; and the pressure that would break the ribs of a dreadnaught injected these