50 Fun Facts About Petrified Forest National Park

Petrified Forest National Park is in which U.S. state?

Arizona skips daylight saving time, so the park's clocks stay on Mountain Standard Time all year and visitors arriving from neighbouring states often have to reset their watches.

Explorers from which country are said to have named the Painted Desert?

Spain's explorers, the story goes, called the coloured hills El Desierto Pintado, yet the oldest Spanish inscriptions found in the park date only to the late 1800s.

Which Petrified Forest site, seen only from an overlook, holds more than 650 ancient petroglyphs?

Newspaper Rock is really a cluster of rock faces that generations of Puebloan farmers kept adding to, so its crowded panels cannot be read as one story; unstable slopes keep visitors up at the overlook.

What geographic term describes Petrified Forest's colourful, deeply eroded and mostly bare hills?

Badlands form here because the clay in the hills swells when wet and cracks as it dries, so plants cannot take root and heavy rains strip the bare slopes.

Petrified Forest's trees grew when the first dinosaurs were appearing, during which geologic epoch?

Late Triassic trees were not felled in one catastrophe: over millions of years they died, washed into rivers and were buried in sediment before they could rot.

Which rock formation holds Petrified Forest's fossil logs and gives the Painted Desert its colours?

The Chinle began as mud, sand and volcanic ash spread by rivers across a lowland plain; its soft clays now erode into the banded hills of the Painted Desert.

What mineral, dissolved from volcanic ash, replaced the organic matter in Petrified Forest's logs?

Silica seeped into the buried logs with groundwater and crystallised as quartz, replacing the wood so thoroughly that each log is now almost solid quartz that sparkles in the sun.

Most of Petrified Forest's fossil logs come from which kind of tree?

Conifers nearly 200 feet tall grew here, but the logs are no forest in place: most were washed downriver and buried.

Which crocodile-like giant reptiles are among the park's most famous fossil animals?

A phytosaur skull found near Blue Mesa in 1919 by Ynez Mexia kicked off decades of digging by Berkeley palaeontologists.

Which president used the new Antiquities Act to make Petrified Forest a national monument in 1906?

Theodore Roosevelt could act without Congress: the months-old Antiquities Act let a president protect land by proclamation, and Petrified Forest came in the second batch of monuments he named.

Which became the first national monument, months before Petrified Forest?

Devils Tower in Wyoming was proclaimed in September 1906; that December the same president named three more monuments in a single day, Petrified Forest among them.

Male side-blotched lizards in Petrified Forest compete for mates in a contest biologists liken to which game?

Rock paper scissors fits because each of three male types beats one rival and loses to another: orange-throats bully the blues, blues guard against sneaky yellows, and yellows slip past the oranges.

Petrified Forest wood mailed back by guilty visitors cannot be put back in place, so rangers add it to what?

The Conscience Pile exists because nobody can tell where a returned piece came from, and many parcels arrive with letters blaming the stolen wood for years of bad luck.

Which famous highway, decommissioned in 1985, survives in Petrified Forest only as a grassy strip lined with telephone poles?

U.S. Route 66 gave way to a faster interstate; its old roadbed through Petrified Forest is marked today by the rusting shell of a 1932 Studebaker.

Which metal tints much of Petrified Forest's wood red and yellow?

Iron is the main pigment in petrified wood: its oxides, the same compounds as rust, stain the logs red and yellow and colour the hills of the Painted Desert too.

Which city west of Petrified Forest National Park is the nearest to it?

Holbrook's motels and campgrounds fill a gap the park leaves: Petrified Forest has no lodging and no developed campground, so most overnight visitors sleep outside its gates.

Lieutenant Amiel Whipple's 1853 survey named a wash in Petrified Forest Lithodendron Creek, which means what?

Stone Tree was Whipple's Greek-rooted name for a creek whose banks were strewn with petrified wood; he came upon it while surveying a railway route along the 35th parallel to the Pacific.

Edward Beale's wagon-road survey across what is now Petrified Forest in 1857 tested which pack animal?

Camels won Beale over as desert haulers, but the government never invested in them: the Civil War intervened and the Army's herd was sold at auction.

Which small ancestral Puebloan structure in Petrified Forest was built almost entirely of petrified wood?

Agate House was an eight-room home whose builders set chunks of petrified wood in mud mortar; the walls seen today were partly rebuilt in the 1930s.

A circular petroglyph at Petrified Forest's Puerco Pueblo catches the sunrise for about two weeks around which event?

The summer solstice is marked as light and shadow cross the carved rings at dawn; the pueblo's people had left by about 1380, perhaps driven out by a drier climate.

Which famous conservationist explored the Petrified Forest with his daughters, collected its fossils and pressed for its protection?

John Muir lodged with his daughters at the railway stop of Adamana and made regular trips out to the fossil beds; the specimens he gathered ended up at the University of California.

Many of Petrified Forest's petroglyphs were pecked through what dark natural coating on the rock?

Desert varnish is a thin dark film of clay and manganese; pecking through it exposes the paler rock beneath, which is why the images still stand out.

Descendants of Petrified Forest's Ancestral Puebloans live on the Hopi Mesas and at which pueblo?

Zuni, to the east, was one of the fast-growing towns the park's farming families migrated to in the 1400s, and thousands of their descendants still live there.

Which Ice Age culture left the earliest camps found in Petrified Forest?

Clovis hunters came first, some 13,000 years ago, and knapped spear points from the park's own petrified wood; the Folsom culture followed theirs.

Which architect, known for her Grand Canyon buildings, revised the Painted Desert Inn after WWII?

Mary Jane Colter gave the inn a new colour scheme in 1947 and cut plate-glass windows into its thick walls so diners could look out across the desert.

One of Hopi artist Fred Kabotie's murals in the Painted Desert Inn shows a long desert trek to gather what?

Salt from a sacred lake is the goal of the painted journey; the walls that carry Kabotie's murals keep cracking because the clay soil beneath the inn never stops shifting.

Which famous Southwest hospitality company ran the Painted Desert Inn from 1947 until it closed in 1963?

The Fred Harvey Company, whose Harvey Girls waitresses were already a legend of Southwest travel, left in 1963 when the inn's cracking walls forced it out to the new visitor centre.

Which Austrian-born modernist, famed for his California houses, designed Petrified Forest's Painted Desert Visitor Center?

Richard Neutra and partner Robert Alexander were hired under Mission 66, the Park Service's drive to cope with booming post-war crowds, and built a whole staff community around the visitor centre.

Which rattlesnake, found from Canada to Mexico, is the only one in Petrified Forest?

The prairie rattlesnake is the park's one true rattler, yet a buzzing tail there can be a bluff: the common gopher snake shakes its tail and puffs up to pass for one.

Which hoofed mammal of Petrified Forest's grasslands is the fastest land animal in North America?

The pronghorn is often called an antelope but is not one: its closest living relatives are the giraffe and the okapi.

The plateau striped whiptail lizard found in Petrified Forest is unusual because its population is what?

Entirely female plateau striped whiptails need no males: each mother lays unfertilised eggs that hatch into copies of herself, which the park sums up as 'all moms, no dads'.

Where do Petrified Forest's spadefoot toads spend most of the year?

Buried underground in burrows dug with the 'spades' on their hind feet, the toads wait out the dry months and surface to breed only when rain fills temporary pools.

Which Petrified Forest reptile can squirt blood from its eyes?

The short-horned lizard aims the jet at coyotes and foxes, which find the taste foul enough to break off the attack; people often miscall it a horny toad.

When Petrified Forest's trees were alive, the land that is now the park lay close to what?

The equator ran close by, so the fossil trees grew in a steamy lowland of rivers, ferns and giant amphibians; drifting continents later carried the land north into high desert.

The swelling bentonite clay in Petrified Forest's bare hills is the main ingredient of many brands of what?

Cat litter works for the same reason these slopes stay bare: bentonite swells to several times its size as it soaks up water, then shrinks and cracks as it dries.

Which region, pushed skyward starting about 60 million years ago, is Petrified Forest part of?

As the Colorado Plateau rose, wind and water went to work on it, stripping away the younger rock that once buried the park's logs and bringing them back to daylight.

In 1970 part of Petrified Forest became one of the National Park System's first what?

Wilderness areas became possible under the 1964 Wilderness Act; six years later Congress created the first two inside the park system, here and at Idaho's Craters of the Moon.

A 2004 law lets Petrified Forest more than double in size as the park buys neighbouring what?

Private ranches border the park on several sides, so the law's 218,533 acres are a boundary on paper: the park grows only when a neighbouring owner is ready to sell.

Which famous railway brought early tourists to the Petrified Forest through its stop at Adamana?

The Santa Fe took over the Atlantic and Pacific line in the 1890s; passengers stepped off at Adamana, booked a hotel room and took a guided tour of the fossil logs.

Which nickname belongs to the largest log in Petrified Forest, nearly ten feet across at its base?

Old Faithful survives because the fallen tree was buried by river sediment so fast and so deep that oxygen could not reach it, and wood that should have rotted had time to petrify.

Petrified Forest never changes its clocks, but which neighbour on its northern border observes daylight saving time?

The Navajo Nation changes its clocks because it spills into New Mexico and Utah and keeps one time across all its land, so for most of the year it runs an hour ahead of the park next door.

Which New Deal programme's young enrollees built Petrified Forest's roads, trails and Painted Desert Inn between 1934 and 1942?

The Civilian Conservation Corps paid each young man $30 a month, most of it sent straight home to his family, while he got his meals, lodging and job training in camp.

Which burrowing rodents of Petrified Forest live in large colonies known as towns?

Prairie dogs shape the land around them: many other animals find food and shelter in and near their towns, which is why ecologists call them a keystone species.

During which three months does Petrified Forest receive its heaviest rain?

July to September is the monsoon, a season rather than a single storm: moist air flowing up from the south makes thunderstorms far more common over what is otherwise dry grassland.

Which invasive Eurasian tree, also called saltcedar, has spread along the washes of Petrified Forest?

Tamarisk secretes salt onto its own leaves, and the park counts it a threat to the cottonwoods and willows that line its washes.

Which bird did the Ancestral Puebloan farmers of the Petrified Forest area keep as a domestic animal?

The turkey was the bird these farmers raised for themselves, alongside fields of corn, beans and squash; rabbits and deer they still had to hunt.

Which fate did the Painted Desert Inn narrowly escape in the 1970s?

Being demolished was the park's own plan until a public campaign won the inn a place on the National Register in 1976 and it reopened for the Bicentennial.

What are the underground ceremonial rooms of Petrified Forest's ancient pueblos called?

Kivas are still built and used by the Hopi and other Pueblo peoples, who count the builders of the park's villages among their ancestors.

Pilot Rock, the highest point in Petrified Forest, owes its height to a protective cap of what?

Hardened lava from volcanoes that erupted several million years ago shields the soft lake-bed clays beneath Pilot Rock, while the unprotected land around it has worn away.

How did residents get into Puerco Pueblo, whose outer walls had no doors or windows?

By ladder across the roofs: residents climbed over the outer wall, crossed the rooftops and dropped through hatches into rooms set around an inner plaza.