THE PERFECT WEEKEND IN PETRIFIED FOREST NATIONAL PARK

Large pieces of petrified wood litter the landscape beneath one of Petrified Forest National Park's otherworldly buttes.

Few places in Arizona — or the United States, for that matter — offer a trip as far back in time as Petrified Forest National Park. Giant fossilized logs more than 200 million years old, as well as fossilized remains of some of Earth's earliest creatures, are everywhere in the 147-square-mile park. In fact, it isn't uncommon for park staff and volunteers to stumble upon a new fossil discovery as they roam across the high-desert badlands. “You never know what you will find out here,” says Bill Parker, the park's lead paleontologist and chief of science and resource management. During the two decades Parker has worked at Petrified Forest, he and his staff have made numerous fossil discoveries that have changed the scientific understanding of the Earth's late Triassic period. In 1905, naturalist and author John Muir visited Petrified Forest and was one of the first people to collect fossils from the area. His writing about the scenic and historical value of the land helped persuade President Theodore Roosevelt to create Petrified Forest National Monument in 1906. The preserve was protected as a national park in 1962. Petrified Forest straddles Interstate 40, with the northern end encompassing a wilderness area in the colorful badlands of the Painted Desert and the southern section showcasing some of the park's largest collections of petrified wood. Many prime viewing and hiking spots are easily accessible via the park's scenic, 29-mile-long main road.

Chinde Point Picnic Area, just beyond the inn, is the perfect place for lunch before embarking on a hike into the colorful hills of the park's Painted Desert Wilderness. Chinde Point even has a species of dinosaur named after it: A fossilized partial skeleton of Chindesaurus bryansmalli was discovered here in 1984 by paleontologist Bryan Small and made international news. While the natural history of the Earth's late Triassic period is impossibly buried across much of the planet, it exists as an open book in the Petrified Forest, where it is preserved in an exposed sedimentary layer called the Chinle Formation. What appears today at Chinde Point and throughout the park's Painted Desert Wilderness as barren gray, blue and pink badlands once was a broad, semitropical river floodplain. Frequent volcanic activity and continental uplift caused the rivers to often flood and change course. Animals were rapidly entombed in silt, creating a prime environment for fossilization.

Day 1 Start your tour of Petrified Forest's northern end at the Painted Desert Visitor Center, where interpretive displays detail the park's unique natural and human history. From the visitors center, head north on the main park road toward the Chinde Point trailhead and overlook. On the way, you'll pass the Painted Desert Inn, built in the 1930s and redesigned in 1947 for the Fred Harvey hospitality company. After lunch, hike north from the Painted Desert Inn into the wilderness area. You'll soon find yourself wandering in a trail-less area called the Black Forest, which contains abundant dark fossilized wood and is “the best petrified wood deposit in the park,” according to Parker. It may take a bit of route-finding, but keep your eyes peeled

Eat + Sleep

Heritage Inn 161 N. Main Street, Snowflake; 928-536-3322; heritage-inn.net La Posada Hotel 303 E. Second Street, Winslow; 928-289-4366; laposada.org The Turquoise Room 303 E. Second Street, Winslow; 928-289-2888; theturquoiseroom.com for Onyx Bridge, about 2 miles from the road. This fossilized log from a large coniferous tree straddled a wash for millions of years. But in recent months, gravity finally prevailed and the log fell to the ground.

After the hike, finish your day by enjoying the panorama from Pintado Point, west of the Painted Desert Inn along the main park road.

Day 2

Get oriented on the southern end of the park at the Rainbow Forest Museum. Dinosaur skeletons discovered in the Petrified Forest are on display, and an 18-minute interpretive film provides an excellent way to learn about the park's ancient history. You also can inquire about staff-guided and selfguided hikes. From January through March, a park scientist leads hikes into the Black Forest and points out fossilized remains that the average visitor would otherwise likely miss. If you're creating your own adventure, start with the 1.6-mile Long Logs Trail, which begins at the museum. Along this loop path, you'll encounter one of the largest concentrations of petrified wood in the park. Many of the logs are huge - up to 120 feet long and crisscrossed in logjams created by ancient floods.

Once you're back at the museum, take the main park road north to the turnoff, on the left, for the Jasper Forest Trail. This 2.5-mile (round-trip) self-guided hike is one of Parker's favorites in the park, and it features plentiful petrified wood specimens, panoramic badlands scenery and relics from modern history. The trail follows an abandoned tourist road, built in the 1930s, that once led to a large sandstone hoodoo (now collapsed) called Eagle Nest Rock.

The Petrified Forest also is a rich area for archaeological sites, and the park preserves many ancient ruins. One of the largest prehistoric sites is Puerco Pueblo, located along the main park road north of Jasper Forest. Here, you can view the partly excavated remains of an Ancestral Puebloan village, as well as petroglyphs depicting wildlife and geometric shapes; one circular design is believed to be a solar calendar, because early morning light on the summer solstice hits the circle's center.

After your tour of the ruins, drive south on the park road to the Blue Mesa turnoff. This 3-mile scenic loop drive offers a raven's-eye view of the Painted Desert. Make a point of getting here late in the day so you can witness the landscape's bands of brown, orange and tan transforming into pastel hues of pink, purple and blue in the rays of sunset.