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Day 41: Petrified Forest National Park

 Friday, Oct 14, 2022 

Today is the second last day of my road trip. The goal today is to visit the Petrified Forest National Park in the morning and then drive as far as I can in the afternoon, so that I have a short drive tomorrow to get home in Los Gatos. It has been exciting to see a new national park every day for the past week, but I am so looking forward to reaching home tomorrow!

As I entered the Petrified Forest National Park, one of the first vista points was a Route 66 memorial. Even though I have not fully driven all of the historic Route 66 during my road trip, it was good to touch it again. 

I got information from the visitor center about the various places to see in the park and a brochure about my primary hike for the day, to the Historic Blue Forest Trail.
 

 

The trailhead for this trail started from the lovely Tepees viewpoint. The beautiful colors of the Painted Desert got better and better as I hiked down the Blue Forest trail. 

In some places, the trail was very narrow, lots of gravel, slippery with steep drops. Had to make my way slowly through these spots.




On the Historic Blue Forest Trail I got a glimpse of the highlight of the park, the petrified trees that are strewn all around. I continued down the Petrified Forest Road to do two more hikes on the Crystal Forest Trail and Giant Logs Trail to see them in full glory.  It is amazing to see these fallen trees from over 200 million years ago, that are solid rock - quartz, manganese oxide, iron oxide. How these were formed is very interesting reading.


After leaving Petrified Forest, it was a long driving day, the second highest of the trip at over 550 miles. Made my way through Arizona from east to west, past Holbrook, Flagstaff and Kingman.  Then took a small detour to briefly visit the bustling city of Laughlin, Nevada which is on the banks of the Colorado river.

 

Finally made my way into California late evening and drove all the way to Boron for the last night stay of the road trip. In a first for the past 6 weeks, tonight's stay was in a large RV/Camper parked next to my AirBnb host's house. It was a very nice, spacious and fully equipped RV, a comfortable experience. It would be great to take this along on a road trip, but I don't think I could take it too far at 6 miles per gallon.

The raw numbers for the day:

  • 556 miles driving, 11700 steps walking
  • 4 Tesla supercharger stops
  • 3 states - Arizona, Nevada, California

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