October 3, 2016:

by Ron Dungan

This national park thought that visitors were stealing a ton of petrified wood a month. But it found out otherwise, and has rolled out the welcome mat.

Petrified Forest National Park had a problem.

About a ton of wood left the park every month as entire hillsides were pillaged, the story went. Rangers did what they could to stop the plundering. They built wooden barriers to keep tourists from wandering off trails. They rerouted roads and closed the campground. They put up signs.

For a time, they even searched cars leaving the park.

The tale of the missing wood persisted for decades.

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Bill Parker decided to conduct an experiment. As the park's paleontologist, he had heard the stories, but they didn't make sense to him. He and other staff members gathered old photos of the park, had them re-shot and compared the old and new images to see how much wood was gone.

The answer was an eye-opener: Not much.

“The petrified wood your grandmother saw is still there,” park Superintendent Brad Traver said. Parker's work showed that most people do the right thing and leave the rocks alone.

The park promotes backcountry hiking and has opened new trails, with more on the way. An orienteering course has been added. The park hosts a bike ride, a marathon and geocaching. It will celebrate this year's 100th anniversary of the National Park Service with 100 events. A campground may open next year. Parker guides Route 66 trips that visit historical trading posts and other landmarks. A field institute allows members of the public to work with paleontologists, archaeologists, biologists and photographers. Park archaeologists have uncovered about 13,000 years of human history at Petrified Forest and will open a small museum soon.
Petrified Forest

Where: North entrance: Take Interstate 17 north to Flagstaff, then I-40 east past Holbrook to the entrance off Exit 311. It's about 500 miles round trip. South entrance: Take State Route 87 north to Payson, then SR 260 east to Heber. Go north on SR 277, then north on SR 377 to Holbrook, and finally east on U.S. 180 to the entrance. It's about 400 miles round trip.

Admission: $20 per vehicle, good for one week.

Details: 928-524-6228, nps.gov/pefo.

Visitation has increased since the park laid out the welcome mat. In 2014, the park had a record 836,799 visitors, up from 644,648 in 2013. In 2015, the number was 793,000. Traver said low gas prices and the park-service centennial have helped, but the numbers also indicate that the message is getting out. Visitors are welcome.

* * *

Part of the reason for the myth of the disappearing wood is that roads into the park have been rerouted over the years.

Parker is researching the park’s 110-year history — President Theodore Roosevelt declared it a national monument in 1906 and it became a national park in 1962 — and has begun to study the ways people have entered the park, from wagon trails to highways. New roads contributed to the myth of the vanishing wood, said Sarah Herve, a park spokeswoman. Visitors would come after having seen the park decades earlier and think there was less wood, when all that had really changed was the road.

“The wood only occurs in certain areas,” Parker said.

Some areas of the park have a lot of petrified wood, some have only a little, some have none at all. As new roads passed barren areas of the park, old-timers told stories of how much wood there once was, right there by the road. Gone. A video at the visitor center stated as gospel that 13,000 tons left the park annually. Traver has no idea where that number came from. Nobody does.

There were stories about hillsides that had been stripped clean, but “the areas where they were talking about, there shouldn’t have been any wood anyway,” Parker said. “What was happening was people were saying, ‘Don’t go to Petrified Forest because everything has been taken.’ ”

So Parker conducted his experiment, matching photos from then and now. The park has since edited the visitor-center video to remove the questionable numbers.

The new message “doesn’t mean we’re any less vigilant about wood. It’s just not what defines us,” Parker said. “We’re still vigilant. We’re not going to allow anyone to take anything. But we’re not going to stop people from hiking.”

In the old days, hiking was legal but not encouraged. The park has more than 50,000 acres of wilderness for day hikers and backpackers to explore, miles of badlands, grasslands and high desert with colorful landscapes, fossils and hillsides of petrified wood.

You’ll probably have the place to yourself. Just bring water. You won't find any out there.

* * *

Some wood has left the park, of course. The “conscience pile” is proof of that.

Visitors take wood, come on hard times and blame it on a curse that says bad luck will befall anyone who takes the wood. Often, they mail pieces back with an apologetic letter. Some have been assembled in a book, "Bad Luck, Hot Rocks," edited by Ryan Thompson and Phil Orr. The dog died, the husband died, the air-conditioner stopped working, the car broke down. Here's your wood, put it back, the letters say.

“That wood can’t be put back because we don’t know where back is,” Traver said. People clean out Granddad's closet, find some rocks and send them to the park, just to be on the safe side. They send river cobble and sandstone and rocks that came from other places, polished rock bought in a store outside the park.

“They ship us all kinds of stuff that does not belong here. The park has struggled forever with what to do with this stuff,” Traver said. There may be a couple of smaller piles, though he’s not sure where, and legend has it that the main pile is shoulder high, but it's closer to knee high at the tallest point. The park is considering having an artist assemble the pieces into a sculpture.

The idea remains on the back burner in a place brimming over with new ideas. Parker said some of his ideas get an eye roll or a shake of the head from Traver. He remembers a running joke about a flat area on the north end of the park, not far from the visitor center. It had easy access, a nice view of the badlands and was not close to any petrified wood deposits.

“I used to call it the campground,” Parker said. He pretty much forgot about it after getting the eye roll from his boss a few times. Parker figured the boss had forgotten about it too, “and then one day he came into my office with these plans.”