As I was walking,

that Ribbino Highway,

I saw above me,

Endless Skyway I saw below me in the Golden Valley.

This land was made for you and me. In a small section of the painted desert of Arizona, you can find forests of crumbled trees preserved as stone. Over 200 million years ago, these large conifers were uprooted by floods, then washed down from the highlands and buried by silt.

Water seeping through the wood replaced decaying organic material, cell by cell, with multiicolored silica.

Over time the land was lifted up by geological upheaval

and erosion began to expose the long buried,

now petrified wood.

They almost look like logs sawed into evenly sized chunks just days ago, but their age is nothing short

of spectacular.

To put it into perspective, they had already turned into stone and had returned to the surface

when the T-Rex ro the T-Rex was to the age of the T-Rex

than the T-Rex was to the age when these trees lived.

In the modern age, the trees have their own stories, having become one of the iconic road trip

destinations along Route 66. On this episode of the America's National Parks podcast

Petrified Forest National Park and the curse of the petrified wood.

Here's Abigail Trebeau. Bum, bum, bum, bum,

bum,

bum.

Bum. Between 1910 and 1920, automobile ownership in the United States increased from 500,000 cars to nearly 10 million.

The impracticality of the rambling trails across the country began to turn into a numbered

...