A few weeks ago myself and three friends spent a day and night in the back country of Petrified Forest National Park. Petrified Forest National Park is most well known for its large fossil deposits, the most abundant being the petrified wood that gives it its name. These trees grew some time in the late Triassic before they died and accumulated in river channels in what is now the national park. The corpses of these trees were then covered in sediment containing volcanic ash many times over throughout the following millennia. Eventually ground water seeped into the sediment, dissolving the silicon dioxide in the ash and depositing it in the wood. This process slowly replaced all the organic matter in the logs with quartz. What you find in the park today are essentially giant crystals in the shape of wood.
Of course there is more to see than just petrified wood in the petrified forest. The park is also home to an impressive landscape of semi-desert shrub steppe and vibrantly colored badlands. Our four-man expedition traveled about two miles into the back country before setting up camp for the night. There was only about half a mile of trail on our rout so the rest of the adventure was totally up to us to create for ourselves. On the way we saw a wide array of different colored dirt from bleached white to deep maroon in the span of a few hundred yards.
The pictures below are of Newspaper Rock, a huge collection of ancient petroglyphs etched onto a series of rock faces in a single area of the park. Park barricades made it difficult to take satisfactory pictures of one of the largest rocks with my iPhone but I did my best. Trust me when I say it is much cooler in person and is definitely worth a visit.
I think what I took away from this trip, even more than the pictures and memories of this beautiful place, was the easy with which I was able to slip away from the city for twenty four hours and just enjoy nature with some good friends. We had an annual park pass, which costs $80 a year and grants you and everyone in your car access to every National Park in the country, and it was the only fee we had to come close to paying on the entire trip (not counting gas and food). Back country permits for this park are as easy to acquire as showing up to the visitor center and signing a piece of paper. So to anyone who doesn't think that enjoying nature is worth your hard earned money just know that the National Park system really is set up for everyone to be able to enjoy the wonders of nature regardless of how much money you have to spend and the rewards absolutely outweigh the costs. Take it from a group of volunteer trail builders like my friends and I.
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrified_Forest_National_Park
