Tuesday before last we left Phoenix and started back for Georgia. We would take Interstate 40 which would take us past Cadillac Ranch and get home late late Thursday evening.
On the way in to Arizona we had seen however a dinosaur park and I had said it was a must visit on the way back home. H.o.p. would like the dinosaurs and it would be a fun kid thing to slip in for him on the waning days of vacationdom.
Around fifteen years ago we went to the Petrified Forest National Park. We didn’t have time for that as we’d pulled out of Phoenix late as we’d had to get a tire reset. We reached the Dinosaur Park at just before 5 pm. We were thinking it was just going to be another tourist trap which would have been fine with us. We thought the $10 a car a bit steep for plaster dinos but what the hell. We were given a map of the 4 mile drive and directed toward the museum first by the man at the gate who was very friendly. So we thought ok check out the museum which we imagined would be a few pieces of petrified wood and lots of toys for sale for bored kids.
We were so wrong!!!!!!! What was this? It had real dino bones and eggs. But more than that, it had this huge collection of pre-Columbian artifacts in the rear part of the building that went on and on and on and on, each glass case jammed full and the tops of cases spilling over with artifacts. I started taking pics. They didn’t care if we used a flash. Then we were told, only a couple of minutes after we arrived, that it was closing time. No wonder the woman at the desk was a bit rude to me when I’d entered, acting like why we were there, which I thought odd as we were the only ones in the shop which I believed meant our business was needed. I now understood she’d been thinking, “Time to go home and here comes another last minute car.” So, in order to hurry things up, Marty got the video camera we’d borrowed from a brother of mine and did a quick film of the rest of the cases rather than my photographing them.
This museum was amazing. “We’ll return,” Marty said, my heart oh so distressed I didn’t have time to look at 1/10th of what was available.
Frommer’s Field Guide gives the low down on the International Petrified Forest Museum:
Three miles west of town is the International Petrified Forest/Museum of the Americas/Dinosaur Park (tel. 888/830-6682 or 928/524-9178), at Exit 292 off I-40. Although this place may seem at first like just another tourist trap, it actually contains the largest collection of pre-Columbian artifacts in the Southwest, with an emphasis on Mayan and Aztec objects, along with plenty of Ancestral Puebloan and Hohokam pieces. There’s also a “rock yard” full of petrified wood, dinosaur fossils, geodes, and other interesting rocks, and a 3-mile drive takes you past Triassic dig sites and more petrified wood. Oh yes, and then there are the bison and the “sand boxes” where kids can dig for fossils and artifacts. The museum is open from 8am to 6 or 7pm in summer (9am-5pm the rest of the year); admission is $5 per car. There’s also a warehouse-size rock shop.
That’s $10 a car now.
Forget the bison. They’re just plain heart-breaking to look at, a small herd cooped up in their pen.
The International Petrified Forest/Museum of the Americas and Dinosaur Park is, by the way, for sale for twelve million dollars. For sale! Watch the purchaser bust up the collection. Someone who wants a pre-Columbian museum and dino park, please hop on in there and buy it and make sure this doesn’t happen. I love this place. I must go back and it must be there when I go back. Besides which, as dusk quickly fell we got only a couple pictures of the plaster dinosaurs! But I found a website that does have pictures of them here. Hold on a minute before you go there though. Because…
I have 72 shots from the Museum and Dino park archived in a gallery. Click here to view. Enjoy! I did big pics so you can read the placards when available and see plenty of detail.
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