Right on the border is a famous Trading Post called Yellowhorse. You can see it in the background of the above pic. It was closed when we passed so no chance of stopping.
Today we have big plans! Onto our first stop of the day.
Covering over 7500sq miles, the Painted Desert is a landscape everyone should see at least once. During the Late Triassic period ,around 220 million years ago, this mudstone was deposited here. Over the next 180 million years it eroded down to what you see today.
The colors in the rock come from the minerals and environment when it was deposited. Red, Orange and Browns come from the Iron content. The Blue, Purple and Grey are from times when the rock had very little oxygen exposure.
You'll find 2 short hiking paths (.5 miles and 1.2 miles) or you can drive the route with different viewing areas to pull over. Check out this awesome landscape and beautiful day!
Once you make it through the Painted Desert you enter our second stop of the day.
They've dated this village back to the 12-1300's AD. While excavating in the area, they found remains that date back as far as 13,000 years ago!
This location was claimed to have over 100 rooms and was home to a few hundred people. This was an old river valley that would've been farmland and lush with green. Being on the river it was also a popular stop for others traveling.
Not only did they leave behind these remains, they left behind a ton of Petroglyphs. I'll do my best to zoom in on them so you can see.
Finally made it to the Petrified Forest! Much like the Painted Desert, this area is from the late Triassic. 200 million years ago this area was a forest with huge trees that were perfectly preserved.
This tree is 110ft long and is known as the Agate Bridge.
There is another short hiking trail, 0.8 miles, where you can walk around and see the trees where they fell. If you've never seen agatized wood from this location I highly recommend it. So many different colors! And if you get really lucky you can find Opalized Bark. Here are some pics.
After spending a few hours hiking and checking out everything it was back on the road. Onto our next stop.
Right up the road from the South Entrance of the park is Dobell Excavation. The driveway is 3 miles long and takes you out into the desert. Once on site there is petrified wood everywhere. We asked him where to dig and he said look down.
The entire driveway and fields were all agatized wood pieces from him digging. You can fill a 5 gallon bucket for $30 and it is well worth it. If you are into rocks this is a MUST STOP!
Did you start singing the song in your head? If you did, you already know where we are. Winslow Arizona!
As you can tell from the pics, it was still really windy but it was warming up. It's all here. The flatbed Ford and everything.
We didn't stay here long before heading to our next location.
At nearly a mile wide, this Crater is a Beast! It's just over 550ft deep with a 150ft impact lip around the edge. It's the most well preserved Meteor Crater in the world.
They say 50,000yrs ago it impacted the Earth. The meteor was 160ft in width and hit the earth traveling at 29,000mph. It's hard to get it all in one picture. Around the main building is all sorts of space stuff and some friends from another galaxy.
We took in the sights, visited the museum and of course stopped at the giftshop for a sticker. The drive out was breath taking. It was hard to stay on the road and look at the beauty around us.
We were heading in the wrong direction, but for good reason. On our drive to the hotel we ran across some oddities.
While driving through the mountains on highway 260 you come to some small towns. The first we came to was called Strawberry. A little further up the road we came to Pine.
When you think of Arizona you don't think Pine Trees. That's exactly what this is, a huge pine forest. As soon as we came around the corner into town there were Elk everywhere. Roaming around with the town people. No one was even paying attention to them. It was crazy.
We didn't know it, but we found one last stop. The Worlds Smallest Museum...and it was small. LOL
Not many miles driven today but a ton of great memories! Here is our trip for the day.
OH and we picked up a new travel partner. Say Hello to Buddy the Travel Cactus. We mounted him to the dash with 2 sided tape next to the GoPro mount.
Thanks for following along and we look forward to sharing more of our trip!
