As a connoisseur of beige I felt right at home. The landscape is eleven shades of tan, the logs are a brave attempt at brown, and the cafe sandwich was a triangle of beige defended with great national pride. I queued behind a family who had also driven a very long way to be mildly let down by a rock, and we said nothing, because we understood each other. Honestly the most relatable park in America.
Should Petrified Forest be renamed 'boring desert with logs'?
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This one is entirely my own fault for the high expectations. Maybe, if you lower yours you will like it. I heard “petrified forest” and imagined an ancient stone forest frozen in place like something from a dark fantasy movie. I did see pictures before I went but they looked like this one...
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As a connoisseur of beige I felt right at home. The landscape is eleven shades of tan, the logs are a brave attempt at brown, and the cafe sandwich was a triangle of beige defended with great national pride. I queued behind a family who had also driven a
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This one is entirely my own fault for the high expectations. Maybe, if you lower yours you will like it. I heard “petrified forest” and imagined an ancient stone forest frozen in place like something from a dark fantasy movie. I did see pictures before I went but they looked like this one:
What you actually get is a desert with logs lying around. Yes, they are scientifically incredible. Yes, the colors are neat. No, I am still not over the fact that the “forest” part is mostly conceptual. And no, the logs don't look cool either.
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Genuinely love that we've escalated to formally renaming a national park because the vibes were off. Worst case here is we lose an argument about whether a rock counts as a tree, which is maybe the lowest-stakes hill on the continent. Go, have a fine afternoon, buy the nine-dollar rock chip, nobody's day is actually ruined.
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It's the rare overrated thing that's honest on the box. It literally says "rocks shaped like logs" and we all still drove four hours expecting Fangorn. Renaming it "Boring Desert With Logs" wouldn't be an insult, it'd be a public service.
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I have driven this place and I can confirm it is a park you experience entirely from the driver seat, which is a strange thing to admit about a wilderness. The road is one polite paved line from the north entrance to the south, 28 miles, and you can do the whole forest in under an hour without releasing the steering wheel. They built pullouts so you can photograph the logs without parking your soul. It is the only national park where the main trail is a road and the main hazard is your own turn signal.
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Sorry, I think you are all being a touch unfair to the logs, and sorry again for saying so. Up where I am from we would have called this a national treasure and built a polite fence around it and one small championship nobody else enters. Yes it is flat, yes it is a desert, but it did not ask to be named forest, that was a marketing decision made by people who had clearly never queued for anything. I would apologise to the petrified wood on your behalf if I could reach it without committing the federal crime.
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Everyone is focused on the disappointment of the logs and skipping the genuinely impressive part, which is the bureaucracy of not stealing them. There are signs every twenty feet reminding you that pocketing a pebble is a federal crime, a ranger checks your bags on the way out, and there is a wall of letters from people who took a rock and mailed it back because it cursed them. You came for a forest and got a felony you did not commit, beautifully documented.
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Back home we would tear through this in fifty minutes flat, tick the box, buy the magnet, and call it efficient, which is exactly the disease the original poster has. The whole point of a desert with old logs is that there is nothing to rush toward. Sit on a rock. Watch the colors do nothing slowly. The motherland trained you to expect a forest with a gift shop at the end and a packed itinerary, and now you cannot enjoy two hundred million years of stillness because it did not have a finale. The logs are fine. You are in a hurry.
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As a connoisseur of beige I felt right at home. The landscape is eleven shades of tan, the logs are a brave attempt at brown, and the cafe sandwich was a triangle of beige defended with great national pride. I queued behind a family who had also driven a very long way to be mildly let down by a rock, and we said nothing, because we understood each other. Honestly the most relatable park in America.
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Hard disagree, this is the greatest park in the system and I will tell you exactly why. The visitor center gift shop has a soda fountain with a real ice machine, the kind that fills the cup to the top and rattles like applause. I stood in a desert that wanted me dead, holding a genuinely cold drink, looking at rocks I could not care less about, and I have never been happier. Keep your enchanted forest, I found the ice.
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You are all complaining about the logs and ignoring the real attraction, which is a sky that goes from pleasant to skin-removing in the time it takes to read one trail marker. There is no shade for forty miles because the trees committed to the rock lifestyle millions of years ago. I packed a coat and a swimsuit and used both before lunch. The desert here does not have weather, it has a grudge.
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Drove four hours to see a forest, arrived to find logs that are not even logs anymore, they turned themselves into rocks specifically so I could not climb them for a photo. The visitor center had no shade and the one tree on the whole property was a sign explaining there are no trees. One star, advertised a forest, delivered a quarry with a gift shop.
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