![]() Nearby in the town of Holbrook, Joe & Aggies café serves up great Tex-Mex food and classic on the road pics that satisfy the photographic needs of any road tripper. Route 66 in its original form is no longer in existence, but at Petrified Forest, you can visit the only section of it existing inside of a national park. If history and science isn’t your thing, there is another unique draw here-this is where you can get the best of American kitsch while stepping foot onto the Mother Road: America’s historic Route 66. Wrap your head around that for a moment-you can hold in your hand a piece of Earth that is 225 million years old. Perhaps most remarkably is that anyone can pick up a piece and examine the effects of wood exposed to the forces of nature spanning millennia. ![]() Flip it over and you’ll see a vibrantly colored, ornately designed interior made of quartz that glints with brilliance in every shift of the light. The exterior appears just like any wooden tree bark does, but when you touch it, it is the smoothest, hardest material you’ve ever felt. Fast forward to 60 million years ago-that is when the Colorado Plateau began uplifting to expose the trees to oxygen, fracturing it into large pieces that lay upon Earth today for us all to go and see. Its lifecycle began 225 million years ago when an ancient forest was buried beneath a river system where it laid dormant for millennia. ![]() It isn’t the colorful landscapes, the winding trails, the fresh air, or even the wide open spaces that makes the petrified forest so interesting-though it offers all of those things. Petrified Forest is home to the world’s largest collection of petrified wood. With about 645K visitors annually, it is on the quieter side in terms of visitation (and why I refer to it as a “sleeper park”) whereas Death Valley, for example, welcomes more than one million visitors per year. ![]() Yet we find ourselves mentioning it over and over again when asked which sleeper parks have mesmerized us so far this year. I’m not going to lie and say that either of us had ever heard of Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona until we started this project and plotted it out on our route.
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