Is Petrified Forest Worth Visiting?

The verdict on Arizona's deep-time park

By Chris Hayworth, Nestward

Short answer: yes, if you set the right expectations. Petrified Forest is a half-day park, not a week-long one. There are no soaring waterfalls or alpine lakes here. What it does have is 200-million-year-old fossilized wood, striped badlands, and a clean 28-mile drive you can do without breaking a sweat. Treat it as a great stop, not a destination, and you'll leave happy.

The verdict: who it's worth it for

This is a park you "do" in two to four hours, mostly from your car with short walks in between. That's a feature, not a bug. If you're driving I-40 across northern Arizona, it's one of the easiest big-payoff stops in the country.

• Worth it for: road-trippers on I-40, geology and fossil lovers, photographers, Route 66 nostalgics, and families who want a national park that doesn't demand a hard hike.
• Maybe skip it if: you only love big mountain scenery, you need a multi-day backcountry trip, or you're allergic to "drive a little, walk a little" pacing. There's no lodging and no campground inside the park.

What's actually worth seeing

The park is a single road connecting the highlights, so you can hit the best of it in one drive. The standouts, in roughly north-to-south order:

• Painted Desert Rim Trail: a short, flat clifftop walk over the candy-striped Painted Desert. Best light is early morning or late afternoon.
• Puerco Pueblo Trail: a paved loop to an ancestral Puebloan village site with petroglyphs. Easy and quick.
• Blue Mesa Trail: the one to prioritize. A roughly one-mile loop that drops down among blue-and-gray banded badlands. It's the most otherworldly walk in the park.
• Crystal Forest Trail: a short paved loop through some of the densest, most colorful petrified wood you'll see.
• Long Logs Trail and the Rainbow Forest Museum with its Paleo Exhibits: near the south end, this is where the petrified logs get huge. Good place to end.

If you only have time for two stops, make them Blue Mesa and Crystal Forest. They deliver the two things the park is famous for (badlands and fossil wood) in under two miles of total walking.

Best time to go (and a heat note)

Spring and fall are ideal: mild days and good light. Summer afternoons get genuinely hot on the exposed trails. There's almost no shade, so carry water and walk Blue Mesa in the morning. Winter is quiet and can be cold and windy, but it's beautiful and uncrowded. The park sits around 5,400 feet, so even hot days cool off fast after sunset.

Getting in and timing your visit

• No reservations needed. Pay the standard entrance fee at the gate; the America the Beautiful pass works too.
• Two entrances. North off I-40 (Painted Desert), south off US-180 near Holbrook (Rainbow Forest). Drive straight through: it's one continuous road.
• Mind the gate hours. The road closes at night, so check seasonal closing times before you arrive. You can't enter at one end and exit hours later if the park has closed.
• Don't take the wood. Removing petrified wood is illegal and rangers do check. Buy it from a licensed shop outside the park if you want a piece.

Visiting with kids

This is one of the more kid-friendly national parks precisely because the walks are short and the payoff is immediate. Kids tend to love that the "rocks" are actually 200-million-year-old trees. Pick up a Junior Ranger booklet at either visitor center, do the easy paved loops like Crystal Forest, and let the museum's Paleo Exhibits and the Paleo Lab do the explaining. Budget roughly three hours with kids, enough for two or three trails plus the museum without a meltdown.