Silent as a murder s Strewn w The eerily cracked, eroded, wind-swept landscape of the 94,000-acre Petrified Forest National Park at first seems hushed and tragic — the open coffin of a dead earth. But that’s an illusion. In truth, all the world waits on display here — the evolution of a planet, the pulse of life, the slide into extinction. This vivid red, blue and purple landscape is strewn with the fossilized bones of a vanished world. It holds to its aching and angular heart the history of the world — triumphs and tragedy, death and rebirth. It’s silent as a murder scene, with a famous corpse and an absorbing scatter of clues that connect to the death of stars, the jostling of continents, the shifts of global climate, the shock of mass extinctions and the magic of silicon. This other-worldly landscape contains perhaps the largest concentration of petrified wood on the planet — the fossilized remains of 220-million-year-old trees that once towered 200 feet tall. As a result, these eroded, Technicolor hills made of ancient stream and lake-bottom sediments contain a priceless sampling of the strange life forms that flourished in the long, warm space between two of the planet’s most devastating mass extinctions. The remarkable geology of the park has protected that precious trove of earth history. The great tree trunks, dying
24 Arizona Highlands