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On a sunny May day, a brisk wind shuttled puffy clouds across the 225-million-year-old Chinle rocks, whipped yellow flowers clinging to Blue Mesa's rim, and sent a dust devil twisting in the Salvadore Dali landscape beyond.Picture me there in the Petrified Forest National Park standing at the head of the Blue Mesa Trail, then descending 200 feet into the bentonite badlands bentonite is a blue clay of volcanic birth delivered by the wind.

John Muir, the great American naturalist and champion of national parks and reservations, is said to have christened this place "The Blue Forest." But "blue" here runs the gamut from gray through bright purple, depending on the time of day and whether it is sunny or cloudy. On earlier trips, I saw no blue at all in late afternoon, just tawny golds and oranges and reds.

"Nothing could live here," said a woman wearing a Louisiana pullover, as a lizard raced in front of her across the asphalt-paved trail. During the Triassic period, when this part of Arizona was a swamp, the lizards were much bigger: sauropod dinosaurs 45 feet long and weighing 10 tons. (See Arizona Highways, February, '83) Phytosaurus, a meat-eating reptile with a birdlike beak, would have put out the welcome mat for this woman.

Where the Blue Mesa Trail leveled out, a man knelt, and had it not been for his video camera, I would have said something like, "This is a good place for a theologian."

WHEN YOU GO

Petrified Forest National Park is 217 miles northeast of Phoenix via Interstates 17 and 40. Admission is $5 per vehicle. There are no overnight accommodations. The park is open year-round, except Christmas and New Year's. The visitors center at the north end of the park and the museum at the south end are handicapped-accessible. Blue Mesa, Crystal Forest, Long Logs, and Puerco Indian Ruins have paved trails; Giant Logs is handicapped-accessible.

For more information, write or call Petrified Forest National Park, P.O. Box 2217, Petrified Forest, AZ 86028; telephone (602) 524-6228.

"Never have I been so tempted in my life," he said. "But I would not take one tiny piece even if they beat me." Maybe, I thought, he is a theologian. He was, of course, refer-ring to the petrified woods that once were a part of trees up to 200 feet in height and now are bits and pieces, fragmented, scattered in arroyos and washes, and protruding from cliffs and icecream-cone hills. The siliconized wood - jasper, agate, carnelian, onyx, and even opal ranges from pinhead size to chunks dozens of feet long. A cubic foot of petrified wood weighs 168 pounds. Going and coming, visitors are asked by the entrancestation rangers, "Have you picked up anything?" A polite way of saying, "Did you steal some petrified wood?" But the video cameraman was only taking some home photographically.

"This place consumes a lot of film," a Kansas woman commented. She wasn't kidding. The Blue Mesa Trail must be the most intriguing part of the park, certainly my favorite. I relish wandering these abstract alleys and amphitheaters, exploring the ridges and ravines, the weathered plazas and promontories, the conglomerate crags and crests. Every foot of the one-mile trail gives you a change of perspective simplistic, complex, like an Orson Welles maze. The popularity of Blue Mesa has existed for more than 2,000 years. For escapism, contemplate Aristotelian axioms from a jasper bench where ages ago a traveler in animal skins might also have rested and admired the rugged beauty.

Geologists tell us that in "just an eon or two," Blue Mesa will be reduced to rubble and washed away to become level with the grasslands that surround it. Geologically, an eon is a billion years. You don't have to rush to experience the Petrified Forest; still, I would go early and avoid the crowds.

PACING THE PETRIFIED FOREST'S BLUE MESA TRAIL