Today, Ginny and I explored the Petrified Forest National Park and Painted Desert. Named for its large deposits of petrified wood, the park covers about 346 square miles, encompassing semi-desert shrub steppe and highly eroded and colorful badlands. The Petrified Forest is known for its fossils, significantly fallen trees that lived in the Late Triassic Epoch, about 225 million years ago. The sediments containing the fossil logs are part of the widespread and colorful Chinle Formation, from which the Painted Desert gets its name. The park’s earliest human inhabitants arrived at least 8,000 years ago.
The Painted Desert are colorful badlands that meet the Mother Road (Route 66) in Arizona’s high desert. Looking like pastel mounds of Neapolitan ice cream, Northern Arizona’s Painted Desert is a vast, striated badlands that extends some 150 miles from the eastern end of the Grand Canyon into Petrified Forest National Park. A geologist’s other-worldly paradise, the colorful hills, flat-topped mesas, and sculptured buttes of the Painted Desert are primarily made up of the Chinle Formation, mainly river-related deposits dating back some 200 million years. Inhabited by indigenous people for thousands of years, the multi-hued sweep of pigmented rock in the high arid desert. The Painted Desert was named by a Spanish expedition under Francisco Vázquez de Coronado during his 1540 quest to find the Seven Cities of Cibola. Passing through the wonderland of colors, they named the area El Desierto Pintado (“The Painted Desert”).
The Painted Desert are colorful badlands that meet the Mother Road (Route 66) in Arizona’s high desert. Looking like pastel mounds of Neapolitan ice cream, Northern Arizona’s Painted Desert is a vast, striated badlands that extends some 150 miles from the eastern end of the Grand Canyon into Petrified Forest National Park. A geologist’s other-worldly paradise, the colorful hills, flat-topped mesas, and sculptured buttes of the Painted Desert are primarily made up of the Chinle Formation, mainly river-related deposits dating back some 200 million years. Inhabited by indigenous people for thousands of years, the multi-hued sweep of pigmented rock in the high arid desert. The Painted Desert was named by a Spanish expedition under Francisco Vázquez de Coronado during his 1540 quest to find the Seven Cities of Cibola. Passing through the wonderland of colors, they named the area El Desierto Pintado (“The Painted Desert”).
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