Petrified Forest National Park - The Land Today
Though the details of the Petrified Forest's landscape are constantly changing, the character of the land itself is much the same as it was when the first humans walked its haunting panoramas. It is still a pristine world of solitude and space -- a place where, beneath the golden fury of the sun, turkey vultures sailplane the updrafts, and small whirlwinds known as dust devils pirouette across the color-streaked flats. Horizons are lost in purple haze; and in the evening, when the sun's slanting rays sharpen the textures and contours of the land, yipping choirs of coyotes orchestrate vermillion sunsets. The cooling air wears a heady perfume, and from nooks and crannies comes the soprano counterpoint of crickets heralding the end of day.
This is the hour when the desert, silent and sweltering beneath the hot sun all day, comes to life. Creatures emerge from their dens, nests, and burrows. Tiny, buff-colored canyon mice dart from shaded rock crevices; larger, big-eared pinyon mice scurry from hollow logs. Kangaroo rats remove the plugs from their underground homes and hop forth in search of seeds; they will be busy all night stuffing their external cheek pouches with food to carry back to their burrows. A single kangaroo rat, weighing barely an ounce, has been known to amass a 12-pound cache of seeds.
Another collector, the white-throated woodrat, or packrat, has much more eclectic tastes. It fills its nest of sticks, stones, shredded bark, and spiny cactus joints with little bits of almost anything that catches its attention. As much as 10 bushels of material has been excavated from one packrat's home, including a pawnshop inventory of junk: scraps of colored cloth, shiny buttons, pieces of metal (including coins), plastic toys, and even false teeth. The long-tailed puffball always seems to be carrying something, and since it has no pouches, it can only carry one item at a time. Therefore, to pick up a new treasure it must drop an old one. It may make several such swaps before it arrives home, a practice that has earned it the nickname trade rat. More than one backpacker has awakened to discover a possession replaced by a stone or a bit of petrified wood.
In search of the park's prolific rodent population are the many predators that stalk the starlit blackness of a desert night. Rattlesnakes slither along the badlands dunes. Coyotes and bobcats pad silently across the shortgrass plains. Badgers waddle through the brush, and tiny kit foxes sniff along the scrub, their large, scooplike ears swiveling to catch the sounds of dinner swishing in and out of hiding places.
Every so often, phantom mists seem to cloak the forms of ancient people walking across the land, and now and again whistling winds carry the sounds of forgotten voices. There are times in this arid land when thunderstorms reverberate with the howls of primordial beasts, and rain-frenzied streams seem to respond with the cracks and thuds of mammoth water-tumbled trees. But even when the day is clear, even when the moisture of spring spreads bright floral carpets over sandy flats, and freckles sunburned mesas with green, the Petrified Forest is a mysterious realm. Where else but in the land of the stone rainbows can you stub your toe on a jeweled piece of eternity?