Petrified Forest National Park is an American national park in Navajo and Apache counties in northeastern Arizona. Named for its large deposits of petrified wood, the park covers about 346 square miles, encompassing semi-desert shrub steppe and colorful badlands. The park received 644,922 recreational visitors in 2018.
About Petrified Forest National Park in brief
Petrified Forest National Park is an American national park in Navajo and Apache counties in northeastern Arizona. Named for its large deposits of petrified wood, the park covers about 346 square miles, encompassing semi-desert shrub steppe as well as highly eroded and colorful badlands. The park received 644,922 recreational visitors in 2018. The Petrified Forest is known for its fossils, especially fallen trees that lived in the Late Triassic Epoch, about 225 million years ago. More than 400 species of plants, dominated by grasses such as bunchgrass, blue grama, and sacaton, are found in the park. Fauna include larger animals such as pronghorns, coyotes, and bobcats, many smaller animals, such as deer mice, snakes, lizards, seven kinds of amphibians, and more than 200 species of birds. About one third of the park is designated wilderness—50,260 acres. The park is about 30 miles long from north to south, and its width varies from a maximum of about 12 miles in the north to a minimum of about 1 mile along a narrow corridor between the north and south, where the park widens again to about 4 to 5 miles. I-40, former U.S. Route 66, the BNSF Railway, and the Puerco River bisect the park generally east–west along a similar route. The nearest city is Holbrook, about 26 miles west of park headquarters along I40, which is the park’s north–south dividing line.
The Park covers about 230 square miles and is owned by the federal Bureau of Land Management, much of which is controlled by the Navajo Nation and State-owned land, private land, and private fee-paying land. The National Park Service operates the park, which was declared a national monument in 1906 and a national park in 1962. It is the only national park to have been named after a fossil found by a U. S. team in the mid-19th century. It was named for the petrified logs that once covered the Chinle Formation, from which the Painted Desert gets its name. The sediments containing the fossil logs are part of the widespread and colorful Chinle formation, fromwhich the P painted Desert is named. Averaging about 5,400 feet in elevation, the Park has a dry windy climate with temperatures that vary from summer highs of about 100 °F to winter lows well below freezing. The park’s earliest human inhabitants arrived at least 8,000 years ago, growing corn in the area and shortly thereafter building pit houses in what would become the Park. Later inhabitants built above-ground dwellings called pueblos. Although a changing climate caused the last of the Park’s pueblo to be abandoned by about 1400 CE, more than 600 archeological sites, including petroglyphs, have been discovered in thePark’s park.
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This page is based on the article Petrified Forest National Park published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 11, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
