Blue Mesa

Blue Mesa

Oil on canvas, 16x16

The Petrified Forest and Painted Desert national parks are connected, and seem to me to be one park. 

The Painted Desert National Park lies north of I-40; the Petrified Forest, south of I-40. They're about an west of  Gallup, NM, and an hour east of Holbrook, AZ. 

The latter was set aside as a national monument in 1906, to preserve and protect the petrified wood found there. People have picked up and taken away innumerable pieces of petrified wood; you can buy it at dozens of shops near the park. 

Petrified wood is nearly 100 percent quartz, according to the National Park Service.  More than 200 million years ago, logs washed into rivers and were buried so fast and so deep by sediment and debris in the water that oxygen was cut off to them, and their decay was slowed. Minerals absorbed into the wood over hundreds of centuries crystallized, replacing the organic material of the wood, as it broke down slowly over time. 

Where there were cracks in the logs, clear quartz, amethyst, citrine and smokey quartz formed, the Park Service says. 

Painted Desert National Park is just a portion of the Painted Desert, which stretches from the Grand Canyon to the Petrified Forest. Much of it is within the Navajo reservation. The stripes and striations of the Painted Desert are layers of siltstone, mudstone and shale, fine-grained rocks that erode easily. Iron and manganese compounds which provide the pigments for the layers. 

All that being said, these places are just amazing, otherworldly, vivid, stunning. 

Also, they are windy. I am about halfway done with this painting when it becomes utterly impossible to finish. I pack up and head out, and finish the painting later, in the hotel. 

Here are more photos: 

And, in the Painted Desert outside of the park, a lone cow grazes, in spite of the wind. 

It is hard to tell, but this is a herd of wild horses. 

At the edge of the Painted Desert

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Dog of the Day