Tuesday, January 7, 2020

Jan 6 Petrified Forest National Park

How wood gets petrified
Petrified wood is created when a living tree falls into a stream, it gets caught and gets buried under sand and mud . Through time it gets buried deeper and deeper under the mud.It gets cut of from oxygen and ceases rotting. Silica in the ground water infiltrates the wood and through a chemical reaction replaces the organic mater with quartz crystals. The log is petrified. Subsequent erosion of the surrounding rock re-exposes the petrified log.  Continued erosion undercuts the log causing it to crack into segments . This wood is thousands of years old

This National park is one of the largest petrified wood deposits in the world.. It covers an area of 50,000 acres
A sample of a petrified log in the visitors center
Petrified wood  in the park
Rose sitting beside the same rock





a typical view of the landscape in the park


It is 10 degrees and the snow still has not melted completely but it was -6 last night.  
We did a lot of stops at lookouts but in this picture we were on a hike of about 1.5 klm.



In the park archaeologists have dug up this historic settlement where people have lived for over 11000 years. It contains over 100 rooms.


They have restored part of the walls to show the size of the building and the size of the rooms





2 comments:

Shayne said...

very interesting place. Enjoy guys

Bob said...

It was a great day. Beautiful weather for hiking. It was good to get some exercise after all the driving.