“Still the heavens remained open and poured out its fountains of water; still the wind blew a gale up the deep ravines, and down from the peaks, and more trees were snapped above the ground, or wrenched loose from their anchorage, and all were sent upon the torrents which rushed down the mountain sides to the valleys below.
“The floods increased, until the waters met waters and rushed on, filling the ravines, the valleys, and all the lowlands about here.
“Upon the bosom of the torrents went the trees, crashing into each other, being rolled and tossed up and down, back and forth, till all branches and boughs, all but the trunks, were stripped clean.
“At last they were pitched into a great water-filled valley that looked like a lake, or inland sea, with its vast area of floods filling it from mountainside to mountainside, and with no visible outlet. Here the bereft trees were trapped. No tides to carry them away, no outlet to drain the water. Some were piled up like jack-straws, others were thrown off by themselves, but all were torn and stripped of their beauty as they had stood and defied the world at their feet.
“Then the storms and the gales ceased. But the mountains were now bared. Without the trees to protect it, the earth on the mountainsides was washed away in the succeeding storms. Then the naked rocks were seen, and in time they, too, were washed down into the valley-lake where the trees were packed this way and that way.
“Hundreds, yea thousands of years passed, and this lake, with its mass of tree-skeletons, and the variegated waters caused by the escape of mineral coloring from the rocks, slowly evaporated and slowly deposited its massed rocks and conglomerate debris into rifts and cañons; many of the trees were covered with the dirt of centuries and are now being discovered and revealed to admiring eyes. We see them now, not as the grand old trees that ruled the forests, but as columns marbled in the most exquisite colors and patterns, and all dyed by the same process of Nature’s art-shop.”
As Mr. Gilroy concluded his story of the Petrified Forests, the scouts realized that they were almost there—at the Inland Lake of primeval times which had left such marvelous records of the Great Storm.
That day the tourists visited everything worth seeing in the two Petrified Forests, the second one covering an area of over two thousand acres. The girls marveled at the huge fallen tree trunks, the old giants of that long-ago mountainside, now transformed into agate and onyx with beautiful marblings of rich crimson, pastel greens, royal purples, dazzling gold—all woven and twisted together. Here and there glistened crystals, pure and transparent as diamonds. But whence came they?
In the first forest the scattering of the petrified trees gave the elements a better opportunity to polish them, hence the colors may be said to be more intense. Also erosion played a big part, and this created fantastic figures of the petrified mass it carved. In this way the Eagle’s Head came to be in the first forest.
The Petrified Bridge, also in the first forest, is a great trunk which crosses a ravine about fifty feet wide. The length of this agate bridge is about 111 feet, but it is estimated that the full length of the tree-trunk must have been about 40 or 50 feet before it was broken and petrified.