Travel to Gallup and onto Petrified Forrest

Day 7   April 11, 2015

We put lots of miles behind us today.  Leaving Amarillo with them getting weather warnings and lightning in the sky in front of us, we hustle toward New Mexico.  The elevation of Amarillo is at about 3500’ and from there we climbed to 7000’ twice on our drive to Gallup, NM.  Climbing isn’t that much fun for this little RV.  It is hard to believe that we traveled so slowly today.  But this area is not like our home I-40, traffic is not near as dense.  Interchanges are few and far between, meaning that there has to be some planning for fuel.  As good as Jan is at covering distance, I don’t think she would appreciate going to the next exit for help.  For the night, we went to a local Mexican/Indian restaurant.  Jan loved her food but I didn’t really find mine what I was hoping for, filling though.  I will survive.

 

Day 8   April 8, 2015

This morning we left our RV and drove over to the Petrified Forrest and the Painted Dessert, about 70 miles away.  What a neat place to visit.   We were completely surprised at what we saw.  First on the north end of the park we saw the Painted Dessert.  Everything was beautiful in pastels and the wide expanse.  From there we went to the “badlands” section of the park.  There we hiked through the barren hills.  Wow, was it different.  As we look at these, they looked like loose soil but when we went over to looked and found the soil quite hard.  From there we went on to the petroglyphs, of course this nothing more than old graffiti by the natives.  These were more interesting to me than I thought they would be.  Some of these were quite good.  One of them was a “copyright” symbol that had been put at the exact place that a beam of light reached on the summer solstices.  Very impressive.  Then on over to the area where the large petrified logs were found.  They had about a two and a half mile trail the meandered through the old logs.  Some of the logs had developed a quartz look that made them look like they glistened in the light.  One of the logs, was stepped off to be over 120’ in length.  None are a continuous piece, but they have lots of small segments that are laying in order.  Some of these segments were as long as 15-20’ but that would be really unusual.  We walked to one that had a butt that was supposed to be 10’ in diameter.   I did not feel that it was that large but who is to argue with the park people?  One other thing that the park had that we weren’t expecting was a segment of “Route 66”.  The park had placed an old Studebaker at the spot and had left the telephone poles for better reference as  to where the road cut the park.