Go for the Fossils. Stay for the Scenery.
Of all the places we’ve visited in our more than two years of continuous travel, Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park has to be the most under-sold. We arrived there expecting to see 225 million year old wood. What we found were some of the most magnificent badland vistas of our trip.
That’s not to say Petrified Forest doesn’t live up to its namesake, too. It does. The place is lousy with fossilized trees. And unlike other fossils, these aren’t impressions of once living creatures in stone. These once living organisms are stone.