PETRIFIED FOREST NATIONAL PARK

BY: Charles W. Barnes

For the visitor today, The Petrified Forest National Park is usually a stop on the way to somewhere else a chance for eyes, weary of concrete, to rest along with road-taut muscles. Situated near Holbrook on I-40 and covering some 94,000 acres, this area receives many thousands of visitors each year and rewards them with windswept views of rugged badlands scenery, haunting and ever-changing soft rock colors, and the world's largest collection of petrified logs. It is an unlikely kaleidoscope of natural history, for this supreme monument to desert beauty displays to its visitors all that is left of an ancient tropical swampland! Standing amidst the ruins of man's previous existence here and contemplating a land that receives perhaps 9 inches of rain a year now (and that mostly in violent summer thunderstorms), an Everglades here seems preposterous and yet the evidence litters the ground in every direction.

Our National Park A FOREST OF 180 MILLION YEAR OLD TREES

Think for a minute of a swamp and images of tall trees with gnarled roots, ferns, sedges, rushes, crocodiles, and dark, stagnant water come to mind. Now, stand in the Petrified Forest Park, and look and images of soft, layered rocks cut into grotesque badlands topography and littered with petrified logs anoint the eye. How to "get it all together?" Where are the crocodiles, the gnarled trees, the dark, stagnant pools? What madness is this to contemplate a swamp and look at desert badlands! Where are the ferns, the clams, the bogs?

They are gone.

But they were here.

Their story is part of our inheritance, given to us by something less than a century of patient investigation by geologists prying into the secrets entombed in these silent colorful rocks. To a geologist, the rocks of the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest are members of the Chinle Formation, a thick group of sedimentary rocks named for their exposures near Chinle, Arizona, where this rock group was first described.

These colorful rocks are largely accumulations of silt and clay, pressed and cemented into soft rocks by time and the pressures of overlying rocks, now long ago worn away. Marls (limy clays) are here, too, with the whole mixture splashed with colors as the gift of iron and manganese oxides. Interlayered and intermingled with the clay and silt and lime is volcanic ash a unit destined to play a crucial role in the story to come. Looking at these layered and striped rocks, the mind immediately thinks of water deposition, and the abrupt and frequent changes in rock type and color in any one layer suggest that the water was not marine. Sediment deposited in the vast reaches of an ocean floor tend to be monotonously the same for distances of tens of miles and these rocks change their character in a few thousand feet. Think instead of rivers and lakes, with lakes drying up and filling in, and the river meandering back and forth across a flat stretch of land, and now the world is right. The muds and silts will be laid down in layers, and then cut out again as the river swings back by. The lakes will fill with soft lime as the water warms, and clay and mud will slowly fill the lake and hasten its death. Slight changes in climate or sediment source will produce clays and silts of many hues and finally add some volcanoes somewhere nearby, and the stage is set. This is about as far as our mind will take us, unless we somehow turn to the record of entombed life to tell us more.

But wait! Where in the world are we? Volcanoes and flatlying land, lakes, sluggish streams where might we see all this today? Surely nowhere in the United States rather we need to briefly think of perhaps Indonesia, before going on to the record of life, trapped and preserved in these rocks. For it is the record of life that is the heart of the story of the Petrified Forest.

It is the trees, of course, that people come to see littered about the landscape like giant jackstraws a ready made game of Pick-Up-Stix for giants. And indeed, earlier men who saw these logs littering the landscapes did think of giants! The Paiutes of southern Utah, perhaps recognizing the previous woody nature of the petrified logs, believed them to be arrows of their thunder god, Shinauv; the Navajos believed the logs to be the bony remnants of a great monster giant, Yietso, killed by their ancestors.

From a distance, the piles of logs remind one of log-jams on a river, and indeed, that's what they were. Their limbs have largely been chipped away and their bark abraded; the trees do not lie where they once fell. No complete tree (with roots and crown) has ever been found. But what is left behind is more than enough to tell a whale of a tale!

Paleobotanists, geologists who study ancient plants, can recognize these long logs as Araucarian pine trees, a type of tall, stately tree whose distant relatives occur naturally in parts of the Southern Hemisphere. Here in the U.S., the nearest relative in fact is the Norfolk Island pine, widely used for decorative planting.

Wait once again! Pine trees don't grow in water! Cypress, yes pine, no! Our tale is somehow defective, and then, the answer is clear. These battered old logs have come down from the mountains nearby, just as today spring floods along the Mississippi inundate large areas of lowlands and cypress swamp and bring with them waterlogged timber from far away. No wonder their limbs are all gone, as well as most of their bark and roots. Log-jams make sense now, and we can envision ancient spring floods bringing many logs down, and burying them and large parts of the lowlands under many tons of silt and clay.

Ancient? How ancient? The trees and other fossils readily yield a reply. 180,000,000 years ago, (a time geologists call late Triassic), the stage was being set for a National Park in east-central Arizona!

What a stage it was! Rivers and lakes, distant volcanoes, flooding streams and log-jams, and the stage is full of other actors as well and some of them would have been nasty friends. Lying in amongst the silt and mud are fossilized remains of fish, amphibians, and reptiles the most ferocious of which were the phytosaurs. These animals were crocodilelike, with a long, bony snout set with rows of sharp, tapered teeth. Their body was crocodile-like in form, and covered with heavy, bony plates. Their feet were short and powerful. Everything about them equipped them as a ferocious predator, and their bony skulls and plates are a fairly common fossil find in the soft rocks of the Chinle Formation.

A small dinosaur was also likely part of the scene, though the bones of Coelophysis have not yet been found within the Park boundaries. This 50 pound reptile was perhaps the size of a very large dog, and pales into insignificance before the dinosaurs who were to follow millions of years later, for they weighed up to two thousand times as much! The Petrified Forest area traces its ancestry to the beginning of the age of dinosaurs. The big ones were yet to come.Other fossilized life includes Metoposaurus, a giant amphibian that devoured fish, Placerias, a smooth-skinned reptilian plant-eater, Desmatosuchus, another armored reptile, and Eupelor, a lumbering labyrinthodont that would remind us today of a giant salamander. The waters were full of other life, as well, for armored scale fish and lungfish were common, as were clams. The lungfish were an interesting group, capable of surviving temporary periods of drouth when the pools dried up by burrowing in the muddy bottom until the rains came once again.

The plant life is exquisitely abundant and well preserved in the soft sedimentary layers of the Chinle Formation, with about 40 different varieties of plants being recognized from the Park area. Seeds, cones, twigs, leaf imprints, and spores and pollen reveal a luxurious plant community dominated by the ferns and horsetail rushes, with pollen analysis suggesting another 50 or 60 types of plants were present in the general area of the park.

A fossil cycad group, Bennettite, must have occupied the forest floor, looking a bit like a large, modern pineapple! Relatives of the modern horsetail, often called the scouring rush, grew 30 to 40 feet tall, in strong contrast to their present representatives which may reach 2 or 3 feet along muddy stream banks! Ferns were everywhere, growing so thickly in many areas that walking would have been difficult for a man. The impressions of their leaves in the fine, soft sediments of the Chinle Formation form one of the most abundant types of fossils in the Park, but one of the most overlooked.

How strange to find in these desert badland clays abundant evidence of tropical ferns! And yet here they are, along with cycads, rushes, crocodiles, "salamanders," clams and fish, and all of the other paraphernalia associated with a modern swamp! Patient digging, looking, comparison, and revelation have

revealed an ancient Everglades scene right here in the desert grasslands of eastern Arizona, complete with all of the actors one would expect on a swampy, boggy stage. The stage is old, some 180 million years old, but the players are very much a part of the plot of life and death, as old as it is.

The trees which so dominate the modern scene are largely foreigners to this stage, brought here by floodwaters from higher, drier ground elsewhere, and buried under floodtides of silt and clay. Buried as they were in waterlogged sediment, a process of replacement of cellular material by dissolved silica began. The process is painstakingly slow, and still poorly understood by modern scientists, but we do know that oxygen is the enemy of slow change, and that stagnant, slow moving water, rich in silica is necessary to change fallen log into petrified tree. The conditions in a marshy swampland are perfect for this sort of slow change and preservation, and so nature gently made a miracle under tons of waterlogged silt and clay and volcanic ash. Ash may be the key to the process, as its slow breakdown in water yields large amounts of silica in solution, and thus provides a natural source of the principal petrifying agent. Time and slowly moving stagnant water did the rest.

Petrification is a relatively common process, for most of the western states can boast on a locality or two where petrified wood can be found, and scattered localities in eastern states have reported occurrences of petrified wood, the most famous of which is the Devonian forest of Gilboa, New York. Nowhere else in the U.S. however has a greater collection of petrified giant logs been found in one locality. What is left for us to see now is probably only a small part of what was once here, for tens of thousands of pounds of the beautiful material was hauled away before the area received the status of a National Monument, and then Park. Huge logs were dynamited for the crystals they might contain, and a large mill was built to crush the petrified wood into abrasives! Early in the history of the Park (established in 1906 as our second National Monument), visitors were allowed to legally carry away 40 pounds apiece as souvenirs! Today, removal of petrified wood is against the law, but petty thievery may still account for 25,000 pounds a year.

This country's greatest treasure trove of petrified wood, though vastly diminished from what it once was, is still a place of compelling and subtle beauty, preserving for all of us a heritage left behind by the streams and marshes of 180 million years ago. It preserves, too, the heritage of man, for man has lived in the Park area since shortly after the time of Christ. His early homes, pit houses, are still visible in the Flattops area in the southern part of the Park, and later Pueblo-style structures include the Puerco Indian Ruin and the famous Agate House pueblo.

Imagine building yourself a house entirely of chunks of petrified wood! What a glorious riot of color that would be and yet that is exactly what Agate House is a partially reconstructed pueblo built entirely of petrified wood! The wood was used, no doubt, simply because it was the most abundant building material locally available! Man, the eternal improvisor, surely never built homes from more elegantly colored material!

After a long period of drought in the 13th century, these native Americans abandoned these pueblo homes as they did all over the Southwest, and headed for more dependable sources of water most probably to the mesas to the northwest. Now the colorful Painted Desert was quiet again after perhaps 900 years of human occupation along the Puerco River. Only the wind and sand were left, and the long logs glistened for centuries for no human eye.

OPPOSITE PAGE Editor's Note:

The painting by Mary Lee Goss is the artist's concept of Arizona 180 million years ago, based on a foundation of geologic study with researched and substantiated evidence. The most believable, and certainly the most vivid testimony to the record, are the petrified forms of the huge trees. No other mineral portrays the colors and the make of the earth more dramatically than the polished end of a petrified log. The displays and exhibit cases at the Petrified Forest National Park Visitor Center are a gallery of nature's masterpieces in form, texture and geological history. In our graphic presentation we have combined photographs from the Petrified Forest National Park, a facility of the Federal Government, and transparencies from the Petrified Wood Company, a private enterprise. The National Park is open to the public and concessionaires offer commercial made products of petrified wood. The facilities of the Petrified Wood Company are mainly for excavating and material storage, fenced, security patroled, and off limits to public trespassing. (See page 33 for the story of the Petrified Forest Wood Company, a unique Arizona based industry.) The 19th century brought the exploration of the west, and in 1851, Captain Sitgreaves, U.S. Army, first described the area of unparalleled deposits of giant logs. Something over half a century of visitation and exploitation followed, with the commercial exploitation and massive removal of the petrified wood terminated by the establishment of a National Monument in 1906.

Now the long logs, the Agate House, the petroglyphs and Newspaper Rock, are a part of our heritage. While a thoughtless few continue to steal from those who follow, the majority of us are left with a wonderland to be passed on to generations yet unborn.

It is a wonderland of eagles and ravens, coyotes and kangaroo rats, antelope, and porcupine, yucca and mariposa lily, as well as a wonderland of logs. The wind and rain scour the land, constantly reshaping and refreshing, and the buttes and mesas crumble grain by grain by grain. Throughout the whole is the story of life, endlessly adapting to endlessly changing climates.

Stretching before us on the sunny calico rocks are the bones of crocodilians and fish, clamshells, and lacy impressions of tropical ferns, all intertwined with the agatized long logs that give this isolated spot its worldwide appeal.

On top of these sun-drenched rocks, the desert primrose, the indian paintbrush, and the globe mallow spring up after a summer's rain, and the "badlands" spring to brief, glorious color. It was a place where giants fell, where reptile teeth tore into reptile flesh in an unending cycle of life and death. Now it is a land of solitudes, whose horizons stretch the mind as well as the eye. It is a waterless land, shaped by running water a lifeless land, at first glance, yet full of marvelously adapted life.

Most of all it is a land of silence filled to the brim with silence, and yet it tells an ancient tale, for this is a slice of nature's timeless experiment with life. This silent land was the land of giants.

"Age Rings" authenticate the growth stages of the original trees. Also the inner bark is present and exact.

Polished end of a petrified log from the display at Rainbow Forest Museum Petrified Forest National Park.

Petrified forms of giant ancestral pines that once towered over the tallest dinosaurs which roamed the tropical swamps of the Triassic Period. - NEIL KOPPES Crystal formations sometimes occur in the quartz logs. NEIL KOPPES

OPPOSITE PAGE Broken sections of a fallen petrified tree in the Blue Mesa area of Petrified Forest National Park. - DAVID MUENCH OPPOSITE PAGE INSERT The Buddha figure is carved from a piece of petrified wood similar to that shown here. Polishing has brought out the rich colors. - NEIL KOPPES Prized specimens of polished gem quality stones used in fine jewelry settings. - NEIL KOPPES Hundreds of tons of semi-precious gemstone material excavated by the Petrified Wood Company land adjoining the Petrified Forest National Park. - NEIL KOPPES

OPPOSITE PAGE

The Jasper Forest area is best known for the abundance of highly colored jasperized broken logs and for the most noted petrified log in the world . . . the 111 foot long log that forms Agate Bridge. - DARWIN VAN CAMPEN

LEFT

Used for decor in an aquarium, water accentuates the colors in petrified wood. - NEIL KOPPES

BELOW

Rare are the museum quality specimens of black petrified wood. - NEIL KOPPES PHOTOGRAPHS

The official Petrified Forest National Park boundaries embrace the most colorful parts of the Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert. Sections of each, whose outcroppings are scattered outside the official national park boundaries, are geologically identical to their counterparts inside the park although not so colorful and less spectacular. It is easy to think of the Painted Desert as separate from the Petrified Forest. But in reality there is the Painted Desert section and the Petrified Forest section. Each is a part of and supplements the other in making the official Petrified Forest National Park the dramatically beautiful place that it is.

Throughout the Arizona and New Mexico Indian lands it is the season for ceremonies especially noted for the character, color and action of their dances. All these festivals, rites and ceremonies, religious in inception, are solely for the people who make them and are never performed solely for the entertainment of non-Indian audiences. The Indian dance in its uncorrupted state is pure prayer. The sacred part of every ceremony is performed in special ceremonial chambers which no nonIndian may approach within hearing range. No matter what the purpose or the time of an observance, the dance is the drama the great ritual of its related ceremony. Although the dance is not the basis, it is the powerful impulse to the performance. Most ceremonies represent intense religious and patriotic expressions on which the life and welfare of an individual, a family or the tribe may depend. The special character of ceremonies depends on the state of culture of the people by which they are performed. Pueblo tribes of the Southwest are especially noted for their extended

Through Indian Country with artist Ross Stefan

Ceremonies which among the Hopi number no fewer than thirteen. In addition, the Hopi have a large number of minor celebrations of a social nature.

In New Mexico Pueblos, the white man's presence has caused the Indian to modify his native ceremonies so that, even in varying degrees of approximate purity, the uncorrupted dance is not seen publicly any more. Among the non-Pueblo tribes of the Southwest, especially among the Navajo and the Apache, the extended ceremonies are almost entirely the property of the medicine men, and must be generally regarded as healing dances or related to puberty rites.

Whatever the season, or the reason, or the locale, the Indian dances are beautiful, important and authentic expressions of belief and culture. Indians dance whether there is an outside audience or not. No Indian can pay a non-Indian a greater honor or extend a more appreciated courtesy than to drop even a hinted invitation to a dance which has not been publicized . . . to be the only non-Indian in the pueblo as a hundred brilliantly costumed dancers go slowly and reverently through the evolutions of an ancient ceremony. The onlooker is hypnotized by the colors and bodies shifting to the rhythm of the drumming and the men's deep chanting. The Indians know the dance as the last act in the drama of the celebrations the fruition of a long and complicated preparation. The entire ceremonial performance is prepared with knowledge and care and executed with accuracy and meaning, requiring for its success the meticulous correctness of every detail. The Indian onlookers are thoroughly informed and critical. They understand its purpose and recognize and react to the skill of the performers. They are quick to note any lapse or error which may defeat the purpose of the prayer. Visitors are not solicited, and are welcome only as long as they respect the common code of conduct used in their own house of religious observance. Tape recorders, sketch pads and cameras are forbidden except with permission of local Indian authorities.

There is no specific schedule for most ceremonies. The best source we know is a Calendar of Southwestern Indian Ceremonials from K. C. Publication's book "Southwestern Indian Ceremonials," K. C. Publications, Box 14883, Las Vegas, Nevada 89114.