The Painted Desert is a 200 million year old badlands area. The soil layers and river channels have been turned red from oxidation of iron minerals. The white layers are sandstone and the red layers are iron stained siltstone. This Desert may not be as dramatic as the Badlands of the Dakotas but the area is beautiful in it own right.
Painted Desert
The Petrified Forest National Park is one of the most outstanding areas we have ever visited. The area was once a vast floodplain traversed by many streams.Tall conifer trees that grew along the banks of these streams fell and were washed onto the adjacent floodplains where they were buried by silt, mud, and volcanic ash. Groundwater eventually seeped through the logs and replaced the wood tissues with silica deposits that crystallized into quartz thereby preserving them as petrified wood. The petrified wood colors of yellow, red, black, blue, white, and pink come from iron, carbon, manganese, cobalt, and chromium minerals in the silica-saturated groundwater. The petrified wood weighs about 200 pounds per cubic foot. It is illegal to collect or remove and petrified wood from the Park but it can be harvested from public lands.
Petrified Wood
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