A LEGACY ETCHED IN STONE.

Byline: Story and photos by Eric Noland Travel Editor

HOLBROOK, Ariz. - The ground appears littered with thousands of pieces of broken beer bottles, as if one heck of a frat party was held out here in the badlands of eastern Arizona.

But to make sense of this scene, you really have to unleash your imagination. Picture a tropical world with towering evergreens and cascading streams. Difficult to do in this forbidding desert? Well, that's probably because this equatorial world existed 200 million years ago, during the Triassic Period.

Those copper-colored shards all around - glittering in the low rays of the afternoon sun - were once wood chips, now fossilized into brilliant pieces of quartz.

Petrified Forest National Park is one of several fascinating preserves in a little-visited expanse of Arizona. Also here are the precisely striped clay hills of the Painted Desert, as well as 800-year-old remnants of ancient villages - pueblos, cliff dwellings, even masonry homes made of hunks of petrified wood.

Protected as national parks and monuments, the sites are convenient to Interstate 40 east of Flagstaff and to U.S. 89 to the north. They can be readily incorporated into family jaunts to back-east reunions, to houseboat excursions on Lake Powell, or to visits to the Grand Canyon.

PETRIFIED FOREST/PAINTED DESERT

Pioneers who traipsed through this region just east of present-day Holbrook were astounded to find massive tree falls that had literally been turned to stone, as if by some cranky mythological deity. They marveled at pieces in which you could easily make out bark, knotholes, even trunk rings, then packed them up and hauled them off - undoubtedly because they felt their tales would be disbelieved without tangible evidence.

Unfortunately, however, today's visitors are no more content to look but not pilfer. Pieces continue to disappear in jacket pockets, day packs and car trunks - an estimated 12 tons each year.

``They just have to have a piece,'' said ranger Lynn Carranza, chief of interpretation for the park. ``The Crystal Forest illustrates the problem. In the area around the parking lot, the petrified wood is gone. The area across the road, where people don't park, is covered with petrified wood. It just sparkles in the sun. To me, that demonstrates so graphically what we're trying to show people: The pretty stuff you're looking at is walking away.''

It can be an expensive bit of theft - $275, according to the neon-yellow flier handed out at the entry kiosk - and enforcement rangers are continually writing citations, while also soliciting aid from visitors who witness incidents.

Sadly, the visitor's experience is negatively impacted by this problem. The park - a long, north-south sliver bisected by I-40 - delivers some of the most beautiful sunsets in the Southwest, particularly at the Painted Desert, but the park service must herd everyone out before dusk and lock the access gates to ensure that the petrified wood stays in the park.

The fascination is certainly understandable, given the novelty of these geologic treasures.

``Fossilized'' is a more accurate description than ``petrified.'' As logs tumbled through that ancient flood plain, they became buried beneath layers of mud and ash. As groundwater leached through this blanket, it picked up silica, which then seeped into the wood. Over eons, the silica replaced the cells of the wood, crystallizing into quartz.

So the logs retain their original features, but they're just in mineral form now. In the southern reaches of the park, at Giant Logs and Long Logs, easy trails often stretch out along the length of an intact, partially buried, 100-foot tree trunk, root ball and all. Many logs are separated into chunks, as if with a chain saw (it's remarkable how many of the pieces are precisely fireplace length). This resulted from upheavals in the earth cracking and splitting the rock-hard logs.

Pause to contemplate a random mini-Stonehenge, or examine the many hues of quartz in a cross section: red, green, white, orange, black, gray, copper.

Colors resulting from other geologic forces are just as remarkable in other parts of the park. Pastel bands stripe the flanks of Blue Mesa - subtle blues and grays resulting from decaying organic material. After descending the trail into this otherworldly environment, I counted two dozen distinct stripes of color on one muddy slope. It's said that fossils of clamshells and ferns can be found in this ancient streambed, too, but I had no luck spotting them.

A much more challenging hike - and every bit as rewarding - can be found in the northern reaches of the park, where a large section of the Painted Desert has been designated wilderness, with no roads or trails.

Most visitors are content to peer down into these badlands from Kachina Point, or view it through the windows of the historic Painted Desert Inn (currently undergoing an extensive restoration), but Carranza had urged me to descend into the badlands for some aimless exploration.

The trail from the rim fizzles out at the bottom, and after that you're on your own - so using landscape features to find your way back is essential. In the view to the north, erosion has produced subtle shadings of red and gray, with cream-colored accents spreading out in alluvial fans. Yes, that's it - it exactly mirrors the coloring on the sides of ancient native pottery.

This area of Arizona fairly hummed with human activity in the 12th and 13th centuries, according to evidence unearthed by archaeologists. Small communities hunted, farmed, traded with their neighbors and scratched out subsistence in a harsh environment (by then, the lush rain forest had long since disappeared).

Within the borders of Petrified National Park are the petroglyphs of Newspaper Rock, viewable from rim overlooks; the low masonry wall remains of Puerco Pueblo, where as many as 18 families lived at its peak; and Agate House, where the inhabitants, at about the time William the Conqueror was making his way into England, used the most logical building material at hand to construct an eight-room pueblo: brick-shaped chunks of petrified wood.

WALNUT CANYON

Carving a dwelling out of a rock face would have been an exacting task with prehistoric implements, so inhabitants of this steep-walled canyon relied on nature for the heavy excavation.

Water flowing over the soft, limestone walls of the canyon eroded out indentations that proved suitable as dwellings. The rock shelf overhead formed a ceiling, the steep canyon walls to the river below provided natural protection, and the land above proved suitable terrain for farming and hunting. The Sinagua people (named by the Spanish, who considered the region waterless) needed only to build walls of limestone blocks across the face of the cave openings.

Walnut Canyon can be reached on a short drive off I-40, just east of Flagstaff. From the Visitor Center, the Island Trail drops down into the world of the cliff dwellings. It's nearly a mile in length but is rated strenuous because it involves 240 steps each way.

Interpretive signs recapture what life might have been like here. Ceilings are not quite 6 feet tall, and the doorway to one room is barely 4 feet tall - more of a crawl space than a door. In another room, archaeologists found a floor of 10 clay layers, and in between each layer was ash and refuse - an in-home landfill, if you will. In its heyday, the canyon held some 300 rooms that housed several thousand people.

The views across the canyon are spectacular, and though the drop-offs are precipitous, the trail is paved throughout, and there are railings alongside every staircase.

For visitors who are unwilling or unable to take on this descent, a rim trail affords views of the dwellings far below. From this perspective, you get a profound sense of how the 12th-century inhabitants went about their lives while literally perched on a sheer canyon wall.

WUPATKI

An entirely different type of dwelling can be found about 45 miles due north of Walnut Canyon, off Highway 89. In an arid expanse of high desert stand the ruins of an intricate three-story pueblo that once housed as many as 100 people.

Excavations and reconstructions, employing steel and modern mortar, have kept the pueblo from tumbling to rubble, while also providing an intriguing peek into village life eight centuries ago.

There is a circular amphitheater downhill from the pueblo - so, presumably, unamplified voices could rise to people seated on pueblo roofs. There is an oval ball court, with openings at each end, believed to be goals for some type of game played here. In one home, a slab of rock rises next to the fire pit, blocking breezes from a nearby air vent; this would have enabled smoke to escape through a hole in the roof rather than filling the room.

Artifacts found here suggest a convergence of different native cultures - Hopi, Zuni, Sinagua, Cohonina, Kayenta Anasazi - but it is unclear if this was a trading crossroads or a location where the different groups coexisted.

Young visitors are often intrigued by the blowhole near the ball court. It's a crack that gives vent to a subterranean air pocket, and when conditions are right, you can hear the throaty rumble or feel its emitted gust. Though archaeologists aren't sure of its significance, this may have been a sacred place, since Hopi tradition reveres ``the breath of spirit.''

You almost want to linger here silently, an ear trained toward the source of that breath, wondering if it will carry stories of people nearby who cling to cliff walls, of deserts painted in a rainbow of stripes, and of trees turned to stone, sparkling in the sun.

IF YOU GO

PETRIFIED FOREST NATIONAL PARK: There is an entrance to the northern reaches of the park from Interstate 40, but eastbound travelers might want to consider getting off I-40 in Holbrook and taking Highways 77 and 180 about 20 miles to the park's southern entrance. Then you can conclude your visit with an easy hop onto the interstate. Currently the park is open from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., but at the end of this month its hours will shorten to 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Entry fee is $10 per private vehicle, good for seven days. www.nps.gov/pefo; [phone].

WALNUT CANYON NATIONAL MONUMENT: A little over seven miles east of Flagstaff on I-40, get off at Exit 204 and drive south three miles. Currently it is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.; the park maintains shorter hours in December and January and is open longer during the summer. Entry fee is $5 per adult (age 17 and up), good for seven days. www.nps.gov/waca; [phone].

WUPATKI NATIONAL MONUMENT: Take Highway 89 for 31 miles north of Flagstaff, then head east on the park road for 14 miles to the monument. (Wupatki can also be reached on Loop Road through its sister national monument to the south, Sunset Crater Volcano.) Currently it is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.; the park maintains shorter hours in December and January and is open longer during the summer. Entry fee is $5 per adult (age 17 and up), good for seven days; this fee also permits entry to Sunset Crater Volcano. www.nps.gov/wupa; [phone].

CAPTION(S):

4 photos, box, map

Photo:

(1 -- 2 -- color) Geologic oddities and ancient dwellings await travelers who explore Arizona's open spaces to the east and north of Flagstaff. The unusally striped hills of Blue Mesa, top, are among the sights in Petrified Forest National Park, while the remains of an 800-year-old pueblo can be explored at Wupatki National Monument, above.

(3 -- 4) These logs, above, in the Long Logs region of the Petrified Forest National Park, appear cut to fireplace length with a chain saw, but the fossilized wood actually cracked and broke as the result of upthrusts in the earth. At right, low masonry walls are all that is left of Puerco Pueblo, an Indian village in the park that dates to the early 1200s.

Eric Noland/Travel Editor

Box:

IF YOU GO (see text)

Map:

Flagstaff

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