Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Escalante: Petrified Forest State Park

On Saturday, Sept. 28, after going to the arts festival in town, we headed just west of Escalante to do a short hike at the Petrified Forest State Park.  The weather was a little iffy that day ... here's how it looked as we started heading up the trail:


Before long we started coming across the pieces of petrified wood that we had come to see.  Some of them looked very woody indeed, like you could still dig them up and lug them over to the campfire:


More of the pieces had colours like this ... this one has lichen growing on it too:



It was just lying around on the surface, where it had eroded out over the years.  The park is a protected area so it (mostly) doesn't get hauled away by collectors:





My brother with some petrified wood:


You can see the tree rings on this one ...


More photos of the coming storm ... something tells me we might be getting wet before we get back to the parking lot:




The rain started coming down, so we put the cameras away.  I had to get the camera out for one last photo though as we passed this large piece of petrified wood ... the rain was making the colours look even better as they got wet:


It ended up hailing on us and raining very heavily.  We got very cold and wet as we slid our way down the trail, which got very slippery with the water flowing over it.  We survived!

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