THE PETRIFIED FOREST OF ARIZONA
Everybody enjoys his stop off at the Petrified Forest. For one thing,
this sight is as easy of achievement as falling off a log, and that
counts heavily with your average American tourist. Even if your train
drops you at Adamana[62] in the middle of the night, as some trains do,
there will be somebody there to carry your bag and pilot you the couple
of hundred yards to the lone hotel which, with the railroad station and
the water tank, is practically all there is of Adamana. Then you are put
comfortably to bed in a room that awaits you. In the morning you are
given a leisurely breakfast at your own hour, and packed in an
automobile to see one part of the Forest; brought home to luncheon; and
in the afternoon motored off to another part. If you are an invalid or
just naturally lazy, you need not even leave your seat in the
conveyance. After that it is your choice to proceed on your travels, or
stay over another day and visit more distant parts of the Forest. In
seeing the Forest, you incidentally have several miles of reasonably
easy driving over the vast northern Arizona plateau with its wide views
to the edge of a world hemmed in with many a dreamy mountain range and
long, colorful, flat-topped mesas breaking away in terraces and steps to
the plains. You will quite possibly see coyotes and jackrabbits and
prairie dogs, cattle grazing the wild grasses, a Navajo Indian or two,
cowboys on their loping ponies, perhaps a round-up with its trailing
chuckwagon. You will steep yourself in the delicious Arizona sunshine,
and be humbled before the majesty of the glorious Arizona sky, blue as
sapphire and piled high at times with colossal masses of cumulus clouds
that forevermore will mean Arizona to you.
The Forest is unfortunately mis-named, for it is not a forest. There is
not a single standing trunk, such as you may see occasionally in Utah or
the Yellowstone. In the midst of a treeless plain the broken logs litter
the ground in sections rarely over 25 feet long, oftenest in short
chunks as if sawn apart, and in chips and splinters innumerable. Trunk
diameters of 2 or 3 feet are common, and as high as 6 feet has been
reported. It seems likely that the trees did not grow where they now lie
but have been washed hither in some prehistoric swirl of waters, (as
logs are carried down stream in our latter-day puny freshets,) becoming
stranded in certain depressions of the land where we now find them,
often having had their woody tissue gradually replaced by silica and
agatized. Whence they came nobody knows, nor when. The guess of the
unlettered guide who shows you about, may be as near right as the
trained geologist’s, who locates the time of their fall as the Triassic
Age, and their old home as perhaps beside some inland sea; but whether
that was one million years ago or twenty, who can say, further than that
they surely antedate the appearance of man upon this planet. The trees
are evidently of different sorts, but mostly conifers apparently related
to our present day araucarias, of which the Norfolk Island pine is a
familiar example. Mr. F. H. Knowlton, botanist of the Smithsonian
Institution, identifies then as _Araucarioxylon Arizonicum_, an extinct
tree once existing also in the east-central United States.[63] Limbs and
branches in anything approaching entirety are not found—only the trunks
and infinite fragments are here. The coloration due to the presence of
iron oxides in the soil at the time of silicification is often
exquisite, in shades of pink, yellow, blue, brown, crimson—a never
failing source of delight to visitors. Dr. L. F. Ward, of the United
States Geological Survey, has said that “there is no other petrified
forest in which the wood assumes so many varied and interesting forms
and colors.... The state of mineralization in which much of this wood
exists almost places it among the gems or precious stones. Not only are
chalcedony, opals and agates found among them, but many approach the
condition of jasper and onyx.”[64]
The parts of the Forest that tourists usually visit are the so-called
First Forest, about 6 miles south of Adamana (which contains the huge
trunk that spans a picturesque chasm 45 feet wide, and is known as the
Natural Bridge[65]); the Second Forest, 2½ miles further south; and the
North Forest. The last is 9 miles due north from Adamana, at the edge of
such a chaotic, burned-out bit of volcanic waste, as is in itself worth
seeing, breaking away gradually into the Painted Desert. If for any
reason, your time is too limited to admit of your visiting more than one
section of the Forest, by all means, let that section be this North
Forest. The trees are less numerous and the fragments are less
strikingly colored than in the parts to the south, but that background
of color and mystery given by the desert, lends a fascination and gives
to the picture a composition that is unique and unforgettable.
There is, moreover, the so-called Third or Rainbow Forest,[66] 13 miles
southwest of Adamana. This region contains the most numerous and the
largest trunks, some of them (partially underground) measuring upwards
of 200 feet in length. The especially rich coloring of the wood here has
given rise to the local name “Rainbow.”
In several parts of the Petrified Forest (a large portion of which is
now, by the way, a National Monument), are the ruins of many small
prehistoric Indian villages. The relics found indicate that four
different stocks of Indians have lived among these shattered trees, one
clearly Hopi, another probably Zuñian, the others undetermined (one
apparently of cannibalistic habits). Dr. Walter Hough has written very
entertainingly of this human interest of the Petrified Forest in
Harpers’ Magazine for November, 1902. The houses of the Rainbow Forest
were unique in aboriginal architecture in that they were constructed of
petrified logs. To quote Dr. Hough: “It is probable that prehistoric
builders never chose more beautiful stones for the construction of their
habitations than the trunks of the trees which flourished ages before
man appeared on the earth. This wood agate also furnished material for
stone hammers, arrowheads and knives, which are often found in ruins
hundreds of miles from the Forest.”[67]
[Illustration]
IN THE NORTH PETRIFIED FOREST
Near Adamana, Arizona. A glimpse of the famous Painted Desert in the
background.
[Illustration]
A CORNER IN SANTA FE, N. M.
The New Mexican capital retains to this day many picturesque
features of the Spanish and Mexican dominance.