Painted Desert and Petrified Forest

Yesterday evening, we decided to go for a swim because the temperature was still close to 100 degrees in Gallup, NM. The water was warm, too warm for some, and there was not a cloud in the deep blue sky – just a silver half-moon visible overhead. This morning, however, we awoke to a 47 degree morning. So we decided to take advantage of the cool weather and start the drive to Arizona before the heat of the day.

Along the way, we took a 2-hour drive through some of the most beautiful desert vistas that I have ever experienced – the Painted Desert and the petrified forest. The Painted Desert is over 42,000 acres and there is a 15-mile path that you can drive and visit some of the highlights of both the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest. We stopped at a number of the overlooks. Everywhere we turned were magnificent displays of beautifully colored rocks. Mere words cannot describe what we saw, so I’m including some of my favorite photographs.

We visited a site with petroglyphs from prehistoric times, still perfectly preserved in the rock. Today is the day of the summer solstice and we viewed a rock which the ancients used to mark this important day in their calendar. Only on the solstice, a thin beam of light shines through a slit in the rock. At 9:30 this morning, the light would perfectly slice thru the center of a spiral petroglyph that had been carved there many hundreds of years ago. We missed it by about an hour, but still could see the light beam on the rock and the spiral over which it had passed a few minutes earlier.

From there, we stopped at one of the largest collections of the famed Petrified Forest. Huge logs, now turned to stone, were everywhere to be seen. According to geologists, it takes a million years for a tree to become petrified and these have been laying in the desert for hundreds of years since.

Walking through this beautiful area, one cannot help but see the hand of God in all of these creations. The colors, the beauty, the ruggedness is almost too much to take in. People will argue over the age of the earth, and how these creations came to be, but to us, there is one undisputable fact. God made this beauty for us to enjoy, and we are so privileged to experience it.