Closed for Businesss, the Museum of the Americas Dinosaur Park
Enlargement
Sleep was tough at the Holiday Inn at Holbrook.
I remember waking up several times and finally found Marty trying to sleep on the upholstered chair. He said the bed was awful. I agreed and said it felt like an accordion. In the morning I examined the mattress and found indeed it was an accordion styled structure, a slender and very soft top mattress stitched to a large soft “boxspring” of sorts.
We’re used to a relatively hard futon.
The agenda for the fourth day was to see The Museum of the Americas Dinosaur Park and then tour the Painted Desert/Petrified Forest. We had visited The Museum of the Americas Dinosaur Park in 2005 and had been surprised to find that it didn’t have just big tourist kidluvable dinosaurs, there was also a large collection of fossils and Mesoamerican artifacts, pottery and sculpture and other wonderful things. H.o.p. had been bowled over by it. I wrote an account of our visit here in which I describe trying to snap off as many photos as I could before closing time (which weren’t many as they basically took our money and then informed us it was closing time, and still we loved the place). I did a digital painting of H.o.p. frolicking as a T Rex in front of a couple of the museum’s many dinosaurs. For two and a half years we’d looked forward to visiting it again.
The Museum of the Americas Dinosaur Park was shut down.
“Oh, no. One of our favorite museums is shut down. But it’s all right, we still have the Petrified Forest,” H.o.p. said, ready and eager to have a good time despite the disappointment of never seeing again the large mechanical dinosaur that had been in the museum’s front room.
So on we went to the Painted Desert/Petrified Forest. There are two gateway points and we came in via the interstate, first stopping to check out the museum and its grounds, watch a movie on the park and its history, buy educational materials on it for H.o.p. (including several nice posters), then visiting the Fred Harvey shop next to the museum where we purchased some big geodes and a box of legal petrified wood gathered from privately held Arizona lands.
As I stepped back out the Fred Harvey shop, on the way back to the parking lot, following behind Marty and H.o.p., a huge raven came flying down to caw at me, did a couple of slow photo op circles then flew back to its perch on a tree at the edge of the lot. I was glad to see the raven, remembering how many we had seen on a previous visit and that they were some of the biggest ravens I’d ever seen. I expected this raven to be the first of many. Instead, it was the only one we saw.
Marty and I visited The Petrified Forest a long while ago and I used that visit as a base for part of a chapter in the Penguin book. The part of that visit I used as a base were a few of the people we encountered…and the problem we had entering. For I like rocks and I had collected a car full of (legal) rocks (none of them pebbles) during that particular trip which had eventually carried us to the Petrified Forest. I had rocks from Missouri, from Kansas, from Wyoming and Idaho, lots of rocks from Washington state and Oregon, rocks from Utah and Nevada and Arizona. We had driven up to the other end of the Petrified Forest and at the entry they had asked us if we had any rocks. “Yes,” we said, “we have rocks.” Well, as long as we didn’t remove the rocks from their packages there’d be no problems, they said, assuming we carried purchased rocks. And we did carry purchased rocks too because I’d hit up a small rock store in Utah for a box of sliced agates and crystal desert roses. But the rest of the rocks were all roadside finds. So, they’d said they’d have to tape the rocks with orange tape. “We have lots and lots of rocks,” we said again, knowing that they hadn’t quite gotten the picture of how many rocks we were carrying. “That’s all right, we’ll just tape them,” they again insisted. So I opened the doors to the back seat and began pulling out all my rocks. In the end, the Park Ranger had helped us transfer all the rocks (bags and boxes of them, all marked with notes as to where I’d done the collecting) to the car’s trunk and then they had plastered the trunk of the car with tape.
This time I only had one roadside rock, the lava one taken from a gas station near the Bandera Volcano. We also had a few rocks we’d purchased at the Fred Harvey store. At the vehicle entry point where you pay your fee we informed them of what we had. No problem.
“Look at this huge rock mom found at a gas station!” H.o.p. volunteered, proferring the Bandera lava rock, earth still clinging to its bottom half from where I’d pried it out of the ground. “Isn’t it great?!”
We had made a big point of telling H.o.p. all about how one is not supposed to collect rock or petrified wood off the park’s land. He’s very good about honoring stipulations like that. He understands protecting an environment so others who follow may enjoy it.
“I’ve also got lots and lots of rock but it’s all from the shop,” H.o.p. volunteered to the Ranger.
H.o.p. loves rocks and tourist guides and Park Rangers. His experience is that they give talks and give you an opportunity to speak up and answer and ask questions. He loves answering and asking questions. He’s not bothered one iota if he knows nothing on a subject, he’ll still volunteer an answer.
We ended up spending most of the remainder of the day at the Petrified Forest, making a number of stops, and we toured the restored Painted Desert Inn (where H.o.p. got a hands on demonstration on building desert adobe/rock houses) and chatting with the Park Rangers.
Painted Desert, Petrified Forest
It was windy, though not as windy as a little more than a year ago when we’d visited nearby Meteor Crater to find there were no tours that day because of the wind’s ferocity.
Painted Desert Wind Attack
At first we tried holding our hats on our heads. Finally, we left them in the car.
Painted Desert, Petrified Forest
Painted Desert, Petrified Forest, Blue Mesa Chinle Formation
Painted Desert, Petrified Forest, Blue Mesa Chinle Formation
It was windy enough at Blue Mesa that we opted to not do the two mile walk there, but we did do the 1 mile walk at the Crystal Forest. When we got out of the car I saw a ranger we’d been talking to at the Painted Desert Inn. She was at one of the covered tables and we wandered in her direction for though she still stood alone she had the demeanor of one preparing for a presentation. So first there we were and then some others gathered and finally she did give a talk on the biodiversity of the area, expressing her love of it, and reminding all of the rules of the park, how one is not supposed to go off trail and how one is not to remove rock. She had a number of petrified rock pieces with her which she said she found along the trail leading up from the parking area. She called them “guilt rocks” as they were petrified wood removed from the area by individuals who, having second thoughts, abandon them in the parking area. About ten tons of petrified wood is speculated to be removed from the park each year. As a result of theft there are scarcely any medium size pieces of petrified wood remaining exposed.
Painted Desert No-no. Don’t leave the provided trails!
As I just mentioned, visitors are asked to remain on the provided trails in order to preserve the integrity of the soil. But there were a number of people, amongst the few there, who were stepping off the trail in order to take photos.
“Look at those people walking off the trails!” H.o.p. said, remembering the commandment to protect the park environment. “Well, I won’t do that! It’s bad for the park.” And the only way he would have left the trail would have been if the wind had picked him off and thrown him off of it. Which the wind very nearly did once or twice but his toes managed to keep hold of the ground.
I took photos but not very many. There were no clouds. The sun was harsh. I knew most any photos I took wouldn’t be worth keeping, which was a little distressing as this year we were doing the Petrified Forest in lieu of a day trip up to the Grand Canyon, which meant no good landscape shots with which to work when I got home. Or shots of tourists. I’d been hoping that if there were no clouds at the Petrified Forest then I might at least get some good shots of tourists but there were so few that most everywhere we stopped we were often the only individuals.
Reaching the end of the Petrified Forest, we made a quick visit of the second museum, the one I remembered from our first visit there, which had all the fossil skeletons. Hungry, seeing that the second Fred Harvey store had a soda fountain area, we headed in its direction wanting food, but it turns out the soda fountain is closed during the off season and March is still off season. An employee struck up a conversation, asked what our destination was and strongly suggested we take the back route down highway 180 to Concho, then on 277 through Snowflake and Heber to Payson and up 260 to Camp Verde and Cottonwood.
We took his advice. The drive was beautiful. Long but beautiful and varied.
We went through a relatively flat area, nothing around, no tourist opportunities, where it seemed everything was up for sale, and not only were expansive lots up for sale they were all being billed as perfect for golf lots. So, if you want to build a county of golf courses in the Arizona desert, here’s your chance.
Then there were mountains still shining in spots with ice. We had seen them from a distance, and as it turned dusk we began our climb into them. Night fell as we entered areas where ice was still banked up on the sides of the road. There were occasional deer spottings. We passed by a herd of a at least a couple of dozen elk which had just finished crossing the road. We held our breaths on a few intense hairpin curves.
It being off season, except for Payson, most everything was shuttered. Almost literally, no one was going our way. 99 percent of the time we were the only vehicle observable on the road going west and only infrequently did we pass eastward bound cars. There were no trucks.
I forget what time it was we came to Camp Verde, but as we crossed over the last mountain we saw before us in the valley below the thin string of lights that are the towns of Camp Verde and Cottonwood and Sedona, and a sprinkling of lights a little up a mountain beyond that would be the old mining town of Jerome.
To either side of that slim valley of lights the mountains were jet black.
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