Amateur Traveler

I have been looking at other blogs of artists spending their time in the PeFo (that is shorthand for the park) and they are young and hiking and heading bravely into the badlands.  I hope you all will forgive me if you don't see a lot of bravery here.   I am a visitor,  representing the people with their Senior Passes who do not need to be survivalists or athletes!

The beauty of this park is how much you can see in a half day.
From Phoenix it is about 3 hours and there is no casual camping or places to stay within the park.  It is beautifully vacant.  One cafe in the gift store and a few places to shop and a lot of places to learn. It is a perfect day trip from the city.
You drive up through our mountains and see the green trees and can easily find snow now and then in the winder months en route.   You can grab a bite in Payson and check out the history and see how Zane Gray lived.

Then you could choose to drive up through Show Low or across a wonderful open desolate but vast Chaparral to get to Holbrook.
Most people enter up north as they see the exit and drive right on to Gallup and Santa Fe, but go to the south entrance and if you are fascinated by the actual petrified aspect, there are still legal places outside the park to pick up some rocks of your own.
Entering from the south, you are closer to the museum and really amazing logs and lots to learn.   If you are NOT up for a full day, you can have a wonderful experience and still get home again before dark!

Or continue through the park drive that is well under an hour, just driving and take as long as you want at the pull outs.  

You will see truly amazing stone trees (NO they are not still standing.  Long ago they toppled and the minerals that replaced the wood formed horizontally, but the chunks left are phenomenal.





You might have learned all about them in the museum as you entered...) and with a very short walk, experience and ancient home of the ancestors of the cultures that still live outside the park.




A bit farther up you can view the place they call "Newspaper Rock" where those people and probably others, left their mark on brown stained rocks by chipping off the patina.  Whether for self expression or communication with others or their deities it still speaks to US today.

At the end of the drive is the Painted Desert.

A Harvey Inn built on unstable clay is on view near the amazing overlook that is self-explanatory of how it got its name!


Finally there is the last visitor center, where you can buy t-shirts, books and gas.  Have an Indian Taco before you head home or off to the wonders of Indian Country.

And none of it requires anything but eyeballs and curiosity!

AIR.

Artist in Residence.

I applied for an AIR at the Petrified Forest in July 2016 after an amazing short jaunt through the park in the spring.  One drives literally through the park and its other half - the Painted Desert - when tracing the old Route 66 on I-40 heading from Arizona through the top of New Mexico to parts more East.  It was a relatively short detour on my way home from picking up an art show in the Denver area (the Wildlife Experience had a one-woman show of my Women of the West portraits, Jan-May 2016) and I had made an early departure so I had less driving into the sunset as I descended into the Phoenix area.

The geology part of the park was somewhat more spectacular than I had even expected.   

The Painted Desert is lovely vistas of the many colors of an amazing terrain and pull offs that inspired.   But I am not much of a landscape painter.  Not yet....

However, I made it a point to keep going south, through the main road and survey the whole park by this diverse showcase of points of interest.  With my traveling companion, Thing the cat, and his condo in the back seat, I do feel more cautious of hot cars, as we in Arizona are particularly wary of the dangers of the heat.   I was only able to stop at the tourist pull outs and read the signage and take in wonders with a view of my parking space.  But they were wondrous.

As the daughter of a Boy Scout (I tell you there is SOMETHING in that Eagle Scout fathering technique... not very accessible emotionally, but excited by science and nature) I always had an ally when the summer vacations came around.  (Photo from one of two memorable trips to Yellowstone.)

 My brother wanted Disneyland.  MUCH more often, I won with Mesa Verde. 

(Okay Dad took frugal to an extreme and National Parks were much more in his budget).  I have memories of Yellowstone where the bear turned over a camper's stew pot and the tent my Grandmother brought home with claw rips from an over-curious bear...

We made trips to The Dakotas and I fantasized the Indian Wars and Dinosaur National Monument with the nearby Flintstone village, and I got a bolotie with a pink Brontosaurus.

We surveyed Brice and Zion.







and chipmunks.  I always loved anything with eyeballs.....

As we went from Denver to the coast to visit my grandparents, even there - with Mom, my brother and very young uncle - were enjoying the PEOPLE'S places:In 2013, I was in Virginia, also doing a car run, trying to jam in as many parks as I could in a borrowed car, when I realized I was now able to achieve the goal my father talked of every summer and beyond:  I WAS OLD ENOUGH FOR THE GOLDEN EAGLE!  They don't call it that anymore, but in Mananas, I purchased my senior, permanent pass.   ......THIS was the coolest!!!! I had one...... just like Dad.