Roving Cooks

February 21-27: St John’s, AZ/Petrified Forest National Park

We spent a week outside the Petrified Forest National Park. If you’re going, Holbrook is closer with more grocery store options, but St. John’s offered an AirBnB that Aunt Christine rented for the week. The advantage of a larger office/co-worker for Greg for the week and a sleepover night with Aunt Christine was fantastic.

The Petrified Forest National Park is huge, and laid out nicely with a 26 mile, easy-to-drive North-South road going through it. There’s a Visitor Center on each end, and a mix of scenic viewpoints and hikes along the way. We took advantage of our annual pass this week; the kids and I went through 4 times (a couple times with Greg and one day with Aunt Christine). With smaller kids, it was nice to do a few of the smaller hikes on different days.

The scenery changes from one end of the park to the other is amazing. At the northern end is the pink/orange painted desert. Greg is plotting a future trip where he/we (?) will camp here in the dark wilderness. Further south, the rocks turn shades of blue/gray. Somewhere in the middle was my personal favorite, the 4th of July popsicle. As always, my photos here do fairly poor justice to the real space.

Closer to the southern end is the Rainbow and Crystal Forests, featuring a large collection of Petrified wood. These are trees from dinosaur times (Late Triassic – 225 million years ago) that fell in rivers and were covered by volcanic ash sediment. Over time, quartz crystals formed, resulting in sparkling gemstone trees of many colors.

It was hard to imagine that 225 million years ago, this fairly barren desert land was a tropical jungle filled with large trees (and large lizards). But, a helpful sign reminded us that the continents used to be more closely connected and land has moved over time. In Pangea times, Arizona was near where Costa Rica sits today.

For the kids, the highlight of the park was certainly the gift shop(s), particularly Jim Gray’s, a mecca of sparkly items in all shapes and sizes. Because we live in an RV, we’ve limited gift shop purchases to things like pins and books. The kids have used their own money to buy stuffies or other small knick-knacks. In this case, the kids were glad to have a day where Aunt Christine came along and let them pick out a special item each. I was personally both glad and disappointed to be in an RV; I was mightily tempted to buy a some polished petrified bookends or a rainbow wood coffee table. Maybe next time!