Fossil Forests of the Yellowstone National Park

UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR HUBERT WORK, SECRETARY
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE STEPHEN T. MATHER, DIRECTOR
UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE WASHINGTON 1928
88781°—28——2
By F. H. Knowlton, United States Geological Survey.
Fig. 1.—Fossil Logs in Petrified Forest National Monument, Apache County, Arizona.
Fig. 2.—Upright fossil trunk in Gallatin Mountains, Montana. Courtesy of E. C. Alderson.
The fossil forests of the Yellowstone National Park cover an extensive area in the northern portion of the park, being especially abundant along the west side of Lamar River for about 20 miles above its junction with the Yellowstone. Here the land rises rather abruptly to a height of approximately 2,000 feet above the valley floor. It is known locally as Specimen Ridge, and forms an approach to Amethyst Mountain. There is also a small fossil forest containing a number of standing trunks near Tower Falls, and near the eastern border of the park along Lamar River in the vicinity of Cache, Calfee, and Miller Creeks, there are many more or less isolated trunks and stumps of fossil trees, but so far as known none of these are equal in interest to the fossil forest on the slopes of Specimen Ridge.
Fig. 3.—Upright trunk and “hoodoo” in Gallatin Mountains, Montana. Courtesy of E. C. Alderson.
The fossil forests are reached over a road from the Mammoth Hot Springs, or from Camp Roosevelt near Tower Falls, and they are in their way quite as wonderful and worthy of attention as many of the other features for which the Yellowstone National Park is so justly celebrated.
Fig. 4.—Ideal section through 2,000 feet of beds of Specimen Ridge, showing succession of buried forest. After Holmes.
Mr. Arnold Hague gives the following graphic account of this and adjacent areas: