| Petrified Forest National Park, AZ |

It’s a very strange feeling, to hold in your hand, something well over 200 million years old and likely never touched by any member of humanity throughout the entirety of our history.

Well, that’s what I did today and let me tell you, it was a surreal feeling.

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You see, about 225 million years ago, present day Northeastern Arizona was part of the supercontinent Pangaea.

Today it’s a barren, treeless, windswept high desert, but back then it was a subtropical rain forest and through a remarkable combination of scientific processes, trees that were felled in the late-Triassic period are preserved as fossils today.

Some 225 million years later.

Given that the average human lifespan is around 80 years, that’s the equivalent of putting some 2.8 million greats, in front of grandfather.

A pretty extensive family tree, no?

And today I walked down into the Petrified Forest’s Jasper section and picked up several of these fossil pieces that litter the ground like confetti after a ticker-tape parade.

Given the literal millions of pieces laying about, I feel pretty comfortable in saying that I’m the only person in human history to hold that specific piece of 200 million plus year old wood.

So all things considered, if you’re looking for a pretty cool way to while away a mid-April Friday, I’d say I found it.

Look again at the above photo. All those pieces laying on the ground are fossilized tree samples.

Think of a rocky beach that you have likely walked down at some point in your life. Except that instead of rocks underfoot, you have fossils. Thousands upon thousands upon tens of thousands of fossils.

The big pieces are segments of logs. As if the tree had been cut down yesterday and through some magical process of instantaneous fossilization became stone.

Well it definitely wasn’t instantaneous, but to me it sure was magical.

For example, ever walk through the forest and see a fallen tree – perhaps damaged by disease or insects – from the inside?

Well…

Well voila!

To me it looked like the only difference between a lumberjack’s work and nature’s was the fact that this tree was now stone.

And thus, more than a fair amount older.

And the fact that walking through this ‘forest’ elicited a wonder of boyish amazement not often felt in the adult lives of science and history aficionados such as myself.

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Lots of tourists there as you would imagine, but all it took was a brief hike away from the car, down the sandy hill and it was just me and thousands and thousands of fossils.

As is often the case on this trip, moving slightly off the beaten path, in this instance a half-mile or so down a sandy slope, led you to well, feeling like you in the middle of nowhere.

Which I guess, technically speaking, I was.

You see, this corner of the world is wide open and very sparsely populated. The majority of the time you’re staring at least 100 miles to the horizon with very, very little to interrupt that view.

And once you get just a little bit away from the few sources of noise there are, you’ve entered a spookily quiet other universe.

No cars, no people, no animals, no planes….nothing.

So both auditorally and visually, this specific otherworldly plain more closely resembled the surface of the moon than any patch of earth I’ve previously encountered.

So I wandered around for a while like the proverbial kid in a candy store, and bathed in the serenity before finally, and somewhat reluctantly moving on.

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As if the fossilized forest weren’t enough, Petrified Forest National Park, is also a wonderland for those even modestly interested in geology or anthropology.

You see, the processes that have unearthed the ‘forests’ and created the bizarre landscapes of the park allow you to literally look back in time as the sedimentary layers of epoch after epoch are colorfully outlaid one on top of each other, in plain view.

And, in addition the lands of the park have been occupied by humanity for at least 8000 years.

Archeologists have uncovered innumerable artifacts from several different eras, and in the short time I was there I was able to view Pueblo ruins from several hundred years ago, and perhaps most incredibly, petroglyphs from at least 1000 years ago!

And in between all my different science classes, I took some time out to make acquaintances with the current local residents; specifically Mr. Raven and Mr. Antelope.

If they were as awed by the landscapes as me, they did a good job hiding it.

All things considered they seemed more interested in any scraps of food I might have than anything this very special corner of the earth had to offer.

Indeed, special it was.