Day 3: Tucson to Tusayan

We made a fairly early start this morning, setting the alarm for 05.30 and managing to check out of the hotel around 06.15. I definitely could have slept for longer, but we were conscious that we had a long day of driving ahead of us as we aimed to get from Tucson (which is almost at the bottom of Arizona) to Tusayan (which is quite near the top). On the way we were going to visit another one of America's lesser-known national parks: Petrified Forest. As Tucson to Petrified Forest was a drive of around 4.5 hours, the plan was to drive for a couple of hours and then break the journey by stopping somewhere for breakfast.

We left Tucson, following a road which was initially lined by the tall Saguaro cactuses we'd spent yesterday admiring. After the first hour or so of driving the scenery began to change, suddenly becoming a lot greener. We also spent a considerable amount of time driving uphill, which made sense: Tucson is at an elevation of around 800m, whereas our ultimate destination of Tusayan is at 2000m.

When we came to a layby at the top of a mountain pass, we stopped to take a picture of the views.

It was a really beautiful landscape, and so different to yesterday's desert that you'd barely think you were in the same country, never mind the same state.

A sign informed us that this was El Capitan Pass.

We were pretty hungry by this point so we stopped in the small town of Globe, where we filled up both with petrol and with breakfast. As we continued along the road afterwards, we began to drive along the side of a canyon.

As you might just be able to make out in the picture below, we drove down one side, across the river on a bridge and then back up the opposite side.

I have to confess that I had absolutely no idea that this was on the route(!), but having googled it I've now found out that it is the Salt River Canyon.

For a place I'd never heard of, it was really quite spectacular  

We kept on driving and by around 11.30 we were finally approaching Petrified Forest. As this sign indicated, we would still ultimately have a way to go before getting to Tusayan (which is just a couple of miles outside the Grand Canyon) in the evening.

Petrified Forest National Park

We entered the national park, getting another $25 of value out of our America the Beautiful pass, and parked at the visitor centre.

I'm not normally that enthusiastic about museums, but Petrified Forest is such an unusual place that going inside to take a look felt like it would be useful. The national park is home to something known as “petrified wood”.

The museum explained that millions of years ago, the land we were currently standing on would have been located very close to the equator and home to a tropical rainforest. The map below shows the location of Arizona relative to the equator back then.

Further exhibits gave information about what Arizona would have been like then and the sort of animals which would have lived there.

It would have been quite different from today, with all sorts of scary-looking creatures.

There would have been dinosaurs too, of course ...

... and the museum was home to some interesting fossils.

Although the dinosaurs were cool, my absolute favourite were these fossilised ferns

The whole area would have been a swampy floodplain, covered in trees. When the trees died and fell, they were quickly buried by a mixture of river sediment and volcanic ash.

Because the trees were buried so quickly, there wasn't enough oxygen for them to decay in the normal way.

Instead they became fossilised and effectively turned to stone.

Over time, minerals in the ground seeped into the wood. Specifically something called silica, which crystallised into quartz.

The quartz gradually replaced all the organic matter in the wood. Other minerals crept in too, resulting in rainbow colours in some of the logs.

While they retain the look and shape of wood, millions of years on they are now solid stone.

It's quite a complicated process to understand, but absolutely fascinating!

There was a short trail called the Great Logs Trail just behind the museum, so we strolled around that and enjoyed the views.

I particularly liked this viewpoint.

At first glance it looked like the ground was covered in rocks, but when you looked more closely you could see that all the brown lumps were in fact pieces of petrified wood.

I have to admit that before today, I didn't realise that “petrified” literally means “turned into stone”.

There were some bits which really did still look just like tree trunks ...

... and then others where you could see much more clearly that they were stone.

The Crystal Forest

Once we'd completed the trail we jumped back in the car and drove through the national park to another viewpoint. Quite apart from the wood, the landscape of the national park itself was really striking.

We parked next to this enormous rock, marked on the map as the “Battleship”.

From there, there was another short trail of a mile or so which we could follow.

The bits of petrified logs on this trail weren't necessarily quite as big as on the initial trail ...

... but the landscape was really interesting.

Once again it was so different – both from the desert around Tucson and the greener countryside we'd been driving through for hours this morning.

Although it was very barren everywhere, the sun didn't feel quite as intense as it had yesterday and it was a bit easier to walk around.

Though if you felt like a rest, there were plenty of logs to sit down on  

It was hard to believe this one was actually petrified; it looked so much more “wooden” than many of the others.

Once we'd completed this trail, we'd seen the best of the logs.

The Badlands

There was one more bit of the national park I wanted to see though, which required driving along a little side road called Blue Mesa Scenic Loop.

This bit of the national park was less about the petrified wood and more about the views.

Apparently these are “badlands”, a dry landscape with steep slopes formed by erosion and stripes of different colours resulting from different layers of sedimentary rock.

As we approached the first viewpoint, we could definitely see stripes in the rock and some of them did have a rather blue hue to them.

There is a short 1-mile circular trail which you can follow through the badlands, so we decided to do that.

The trail started out flat, then began to lead quite steeply downhill.

The views were absolutely spectacular.

It was all so surreal, it felt like we were on a different planet!

Soon we were down in the bottom of the valley.

There were a few other people around, but mostly we had the views completely to ourselves.

The lack of crowds was particularly remarkable because today was actually a public holiday (Labor Day) in the USA, so I suspect that some of the more popular and accessible national parks will have been very busy.

A 1-mile circular trail sounds like it's going to be quite easy. 

Because we'd come quite a long way downhill, however, there was quite a lot of uphill to do to get back to the car.

It was totally worth it though to get to visit such a unique place

In the Neighbourhood of the Grand Canyon

From Petrified Forest we drove for another couple of hours through Arizona until we reached the town of Flagstaff. On the way we spent a little bit of time driving on the famous Route 66, though I didn't manage to get a very good photo of any of the signs.

We stopped at an IHOP in Flagstaff to have a late lunch/early dinner. We both had breaded chicken, which was really tasty ...

... and shared some doughnut balls covered in cinnamon for desert.

It was after 17.30 by the time we left Flagstaff and we still had about 90 minutes of driving left to get to Tusayan. We caught sight of a beautiful sunset in the distance ...

... and pulled over into a layby to get a better look.

It's always hard to capture the colours with a camera, but it was really gorgeous  

Around 19.30 we finally arrived in Tusayan, where we're staying in the same hotel we stayed in back in 2022. It's quite expensive for what it is, but we're paying for the fact that we're just a few miles away from the entrance to Grand Canyon National Park. And the room is nice and spacious

We were pretty tired by this point - as you'll see from the map below, we covered a lot of distance today – but it was definitely worth it to see some amazing places