I'm about two days ahead of schedule, so I decided to do a little sightseeing. Fortunately, the one place I really wanted to see (which is actually on my Vanishing America destination list) was on my way. I'm talking about The Petrified Forest.

Over 225 million years ago, Arizona was a trememdous floodplain filled with trees, streams, and numerous flora and fauna -- the kind one would expect to see in a swamp like the Okefenokee.

Over time, as the climate changed, and Mother Nature did her thing, the trees fell, volcanoes erupted, and everything was buried under mud, ash, and water.

Silica in the groundwater penetrated the downed trees and, over time, crystallized into quartz -- which is what we see today in these petrified trees.

My first impression of the forest (most likely from old Bugs Bunny cartoons when I was a kid), was of thousands of standing trees that were hard as... well... rocks. But, what is actually there is much different. The desert landscape is typical of what you would see in northern Arizona -- washes, gullies, mesas, incredible sand formations, and lots of rocks. But, the interesting thing is that many of these "rocks" are actually the remains of ancient trees. And, some are so well preserved that, at first glance, you would swear they were simply old logs just waiting for the right campfire.

But, what you see today is nothing compared to what was here when this area was discovered. Since the early 1900s, thousands of tons of these beautiful trees, logs, and fragments have been removed. Many were carried away by souvenir hunters, and some were even ground up at a nearby mill for use as abrasives. What remains is a mere fraction of what was originally there.

Fortunately, the area was made into a National Monument in 1906, but that hasn't stopped people from trekking out with a piece of forest in their possession. Footprints litter the landscape off the designated trails, and gift shops are plentiful in the towns surrounding the park, including one that seemed to have more logs and pieces of logs than the whole of the protected forest itself.

It would have been very easy for me to walk out (well, drive out) with a busload of petrified wood, but I prefer to live by the golden rule of exploration and education: Take Only Pictures, Leave No Trace. How else will future generations get to enjoy such spectacular beauty and magic?

Tomorrow... Prescott!