Places We Visited
Pick a stop to see its story and photos.
Meteor Crater was the first stop on the way to Petrified Forest National Park, just off I-40. The crater is enormous, nearly a mile wide and hundreds of feet deep, with visitor center exhibits and rim viewpoints that make it worth the detour before continuing east.
Winslow was the quick Route 66 leg stretch on the way to Petrified Forest National Park, centered on the famous Standin' on the Corner stop with the Eagles lyric, red flatbed Ford, public art, and a dose of small-town Arizona road-trip fun.
Crystal Forest Museum was our free overnight spot just outside the south entrance of Petrified Forest National Park. It was not fancy, but it gave us an easy place to sleep after the park closed and kept us right by the Crystal Forest Museum and Gift Shop.
Giant Logs Trail sits behind the Rainbow Forest Museum in Petrified Forest National Park and makes an easy first walk among the park's huge petrified logs. The paved loop is only about 0.4 miles, but it packs in massive, colorful fossilized trunks, including some of the largest in the park.
Crystal Forest is a short Petrified Forest National Park hike, a paved 0.75-mile loop through one of the park's best concentrations of petrified wood. The logs here are broken open with quartz and mineral color, so the trail feels like wandering through a glittering ancient log field.
Agate House is one of the more unusual human-history stops in Petrified Forest National Park, reached by a longer walk from the Rainbow Forest area. The full Long Logs and Agate House route is about 2.6 miles round trip, leading to a partially reconstructed pueblo built with petrified wood.
Agate Bridge is a quick roadside stop in Petrified Forest National Park, where a 110-foot petrified log spans a shallow gully. It is more pullout than hike, but it is a great example of how enormous these ancient trees were before they turned to stone.
Jasper Forest is a roadside overlook in Petrified Forest National Park with a wide view over one of the park's dense petrified wood deposits. It is an easy pullout stop, good for taking in the scale of the fossil wood without committing to another trail.
Blue Mesa Trail was the standout short hike in Petrified Forest National Park: a 1-mile loop that drops from the mesa into bluish, purple, and gray bentonite badlands with petrified wood scattered through the clay hills. It is short, but the initial descent and climb back out make it feel more substantial than a flat overlook stop.
Puerco Pueblo is a short 0.3-mile paved loop in Petrified Forest National Park through the remains of an ancestral Puebloan village. The trail passes walls from a once-large pueblo and petroglyphs near the south end, making it an easy but meaningful history stop.
Newspaper Rock is a separate roadside overlook in Petrified Forest National Park, reached from its own pullout along the park road. A short overlook path leads to views of boulders covered with hundreds of petroglyphs, adding a vivid human-history stop between the badlands and pueblo sites.
Painted Desert Inn is a historic roadside stop and museum in Petrified Forest National Park, perched near Kachina Point with big Painted Desert views. The nearby Painted Desert Rim Trail runs about 1 mile round trip between Tawa Point and Kachina Point, so it works as either a quick overlook or a short leg-stretcher.
Tawa Point is a Painted Desert overlook in Petrified Forest National Park and one end of the Tawa Trail, a 1.2-mile one-way path to the Painted Desert Visitor Center. Even as a simple roadside stop, it gives a wide first look over the red badlands in the north end of the park.
