Petrified Forest National Monument

Once again, it's time to look back on my youngest and my 2017 road trip to Wisconsin and back. When last we checked, we had stopped at Capulin Volcano National Monument in northeast New Mexico. The following morning, we headed off with the intention of making it into Arizona, somewhere near Petrified Forest National Park. As we drove we, of course, geocached along the way, because that's what we do.

We stopped for lunch in Albuquerque, New Mexico and then continued on to Arizona, reaching Petrified Forest sometime around 3 o'clock in the afternoon, which gave us plenty of time to tour the park. This was my second visit to the park and the first for my youngest. For those of you unfamiliar with the park, you can either enter the park at the southern end or at the northern along Interstate 40. There is no established camping in the park but there is plenty of wilderness backpacking opportunities, although you'd have to be prepared since it is a desert and water is scarce.

The park, for the most park is a drive through, something that can be seen in a couple of hours, but that doesn't diminish it in any way as a national park. The scenery is breathtaking with broad vistas in the northern part of the park. The small loop hikes take place in the southern part of the park where the concentration of petrified wood is found There's even several geocaches located within the park boundaries, which is very rare since the National Park Service views most geocaches as litter, but since these were all placed by a ranger who was stationed in the park, the park service allowed these. They even have a page dedicated to geocaching on their website. For the most part they were simple hides, but they took you to many viewpoints and points of interest within the park, without impacting the landscape in any way. Besides the traditional caches, we also found a couple of virtual caches and a couple of geological based earth caches.

Looking at the second shot, you can see in the distance, a developing thunderstorm. This would curtail a little bit of what we wanted to do, but we still were able to enjoy the park and what it had to offer. We drove through the painted desert part (northern) and stopped at all of the viewpoints, including one where there was a rusted hulk of a very old Studebacker roadster where there is a geocache hidden. Petrified Forest also has the distinction of being the only national park that the original Route 66 crosses through, which is what this viewpoint was pointing out.

After that viewpoint, you then cross over Interstate 40 and are now in the petrified forest. At every viewpoint, you get glimpses of logs, petrified with beautiful colors. As you can see in the third pooh  the colors of all of the logs were simply amazing. According to the park's website, the colors primarily come from three different minerals. "Pure quartz is white, manganese oxides form blue, purple, black, and brown, and iron oxides provide hues from yellow through red to brown." Most of the logs during this point are farther away, but you can walk out to them. Being in the high 90s, we opted to take photos and then continued on our drive, hoping to hike the Crystal Forest loop trail.

Once we got down to the Crystal Forest, we stopped and decided to hike the loop which takes you through a large portion of petrified wood and brings you very close to a lot of the logs that are preserved in the park. The temperature had cooled down considerably at this point owing to the impending thunderstorm which was approaching from the east. We kept hearing thunder in the distance and occasionally would see flashes of lightning, so we quickened our pace just a little bit. There's not a lot of cover out in the desert so the threat of a lightning strike was slightly higher, not to mention the distinct possibility that we could get rained on by a cloudburst.

I took some more photos and we finished up the loop and hurried back to our car, getting there just about the time it had started to rain. You can see the rain in the distance of the last photo as we hiked the Crystal Forest loop trail. As we walked the loop, I was struck by the immenseness of the logs, many like the one in the last photo lining the edge of the trail. I also lamented the fact that there had to be signs along the trail at regular intervals telling people that it was against the law to remove any of the petrified rock. In fact, people were encouraged to report other people who had removed pieces of petrified rock from the area. As you can see from the last photo, there's a lot of petrified wood, but if everyone took a piece every time they visited, the park would soon not have any of its namesake to even be a park anymore. If you are out and about anywhere, please practice the Leave No Trace principles as outlined on the link provided.

As noted above, you can probably see the entire park in about a couple of hours. To really delve into some of the trails, it would probably be more like four or five hours. But if you're traveling on Interstate 40, in the eastern part of the state and you're not in a hurry, this is a spot that you'll probably enjoy. I've been back a second time in October of 2019 when I was coming back from my Colorado road trip. I mainly stopped that time to find some of the geocaches that we hadn't found on the previous road trip mainly because it was really hot the day we were there. In October, I didn't have worry about heat and I was able to find the ones we'd bypassed two years previously.

Capulin Volcano National Monument

This is a continuation of our 2017 road trip that I took with my youngest in June and July of that year. The day we drove through 5 states in one day, we stopped at Capulin Volcano National Monument in the late afternoon for a quick day trip of this out of the way national monument. It's a small park, only open during daylight hours, so it's perfect for a quick side trip. 

Usually, when we enter a national park or monument, we usually hit the visitors center first and this part was no exception, but there were a couple of extenuating circumstances to this visit. There was an actual physical geocache located inside the visitors center. Usually, geocaches are not allowed within national park boundaries, because the park service views geocaches as litter, for obvious reasons. However, this one was being maintained by one of the rangers there and so this was one of those special circumstances. I'd found a geocache hidden in the visitors center of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, but this one was a little bit easier to find, because all we had to do was ask the person behind the desk for the geocache and they pulled it out from behind the counter. Cool deal all the way around. After signing the logsheet and dropping a travel bug off in the container, we then headed back to the car and the road which would take us to the rim parking lot.

This particular monument is only open during daylight hours, there is no camping inside the park, so it would only take a couple of hours to tour the entire park. We spent about an hour and a half there, either in the visitors center, or walking the rim trail around the volcano. We opted not to make any hikes after the rim trail mainly because we had had a long day already and still had another hour or so to drive to get to our motel room further down the road.

The rim trail is self guiding with several interpretive signs around the rim giving you insight into why this volcano is here and what happened when it erupted many thousands of years ago. Because it stands out from the surrounding landscape, it offered views of New Mexico in all directions. I'm sure that if we'd been paying attention to details on a couple of the signs, we might have been able to see into Utah to the north, but I don't recall any distinguishing features that stood out.

There were two interesting things that did stand out on that particular walk. The first was the abundance of ladybugs that were in the early stages of getting out of hibernation and into mating mode. They were everywhere and I got a couple of shots of them, but nothing to write home about. Those of you who are still reading at this point are probably wondering, why I chose to put a picture of a damaged bench here instead of a photo of the ladybugs.

Well, this damaged bench was interesting, mainly because the damage was caused by a lightning strike. That, in my estimation, made it the coolest thing we saw up there on the rim that day. The bench actually had its own interpretive sign, so we weren't just guessing about it and we didn't really wonder whether we were in danger of a possible strike since the clouds off in the distance weren't the thunderhead type of clouds.

While up on the rim, we also completed what needed to be done for a virtual cache that was in the park and we would have probably also completed the steps for an earthcache that was there as well, but hadn't read the cache page ahead of time. It was only after we were back down off of the volcano that we realized that the information that we needed was back up on the rim and there wasn't enough time left to get back up there before the park closed, and so we called it a day.

All in all, it was an enjoyable couple of hours we spent in the park, once again marveling at the power of nature. If you're ever in the northeast corner of New Mexico, you might want to consider checking out this little park. It was a mid summer day and we practically had the park all to ourselves.