A mile or two east of the Museum is the Third Forest. Here is a tangible sign that our far-removed forefathers admired the utility of the petrified wood, if they did not appreciate its beauty.
The ruins of quite a castle stand on the crest of a hill overlooking the plains, and one can almost visualize the first dwellers in this mystic land. See them laboriously carrying the heavy blocks of petrified wood to the top of the hill where they are laid out in orderly rows to form rooms. In the meantime, a close watch is kept that neither animal nor human enemy may creep up unheeded. The walls have fallen during the passage of time, but each foundation can be traced. Shards of broken pottery in great amounts lie at the base of the hill. We wonder if some angry housewife fired it out at her better half as he stumbled home from a prehistoric lodge room too late to please her?
Here, too, are found the workshops of arrowmakers. Chips, flaked thin as wafers, lie like bits of rainbows about the place, and show that they were broken from larger pieces by human agencies. This, we think, was done by heating the rock wood to a high temperature and then touching, lightly, the spot to be chipped with a feather dipped in water.
The Second Forest
Leaving the Headquarters area, where the Museum is located, the visitor drives over a winding road, beautiful in its arid desert beauty, six or seven miles to reach the Second Forest. Were it my privilege to name this lovely section I should call it “The Coral Garden”. In this “forest” are many logs encrusted with coral formation. Some of them have broken apart and even the interiors are mossed with the coral, soft rose in color. The ground is covered with tiny round stones, coral colored. Here many logs are filled with crystals and the range of coloring found in the chips strewn over the landscape is marvelous. Many pebbles bear the impression of seashells, and deep in the heart of a section of petrified log was found a fossilized mussel.
Courtesy National Park Service
At one place in the First Forest a slender column of rock rises to the height of thirty or forty feet. This is the Eagle Rock.
There is little of the sandstone cap in this area, and the logs lie in the blue-gray marl formation. Here we find larger trees in greater masses than elsewhere. Many of the trees lie piled on top of others in the coulees and small arroyos, carved out by wind and rain, during the centuries since these logs first settled there. One big tree, near the road, is mashed flat its entire length of perhaps ninety feet. Evidences of bark are plain on this particular log, and where the limbs were torn off, the grain of the wood is quite discernible. One could spend hours in this area, spellbound with the beautiful sight.