Petrified Forest Gift Shop and Museum Campground
Petrified Forest Road Holbrook, AZ
Site 10; $10.85/day – 2 days; May 2 – 3, 2017
There are two entrances to Petrified Forest, one off I-40 and a second off SR 350. The main road of the park goes from one entrance to the other. The Petrified Forest Gift Shop and Crystal Forest Gift shop are the only places to camp, and they are at the second entrance to the park. Petrified Forest Gift Shop has 10 sites with tables, a concrete pad, electricity (no sewer, no water) for $10.85 per night. The Crystal Forest Gift Shop across the street has no utilities, but lets you camp for free. They have quite a few sites set up there. There are even some “teepees” in that campground that I guess you could camp in, too, but I don’t think I would, as there is no light in them and there could easily be creepy-crawlies of any kind in there! So if you come into the park from I-40 as we did, you’ll have to drive all the way through the park (28 miles) to get to the other entrance and park your camper. It was not a problem to pull the trailer through the park, as there were no steep inclines. The road was not potholed, but still rough like riding in a small boat in very choppy water! It took about 45 minutes to an hour to drive all the way through. We stopped at a few pull-offs for pictures, but saved the main “looking” for the next day’s visit. I was very tired from driving all day and was disappointed to find that we had so much farther to drive before getting to our campground. Should have had Bob do some of the driving!
When you come upon the Park from the East, you’ll have been traveling over very flat and empty land for many miles. Then suddenly in the park, the land drops off and you see stunning views of the Painted Desert below stretching for miles. Stunning colors! Then the land gradually becomes flat again and then into the hills and valleys of the Petrified Forest. Of course, there are no trees, but you see scattered pieces of petrified tree trunks everywhere. And there is much more land of ravines, cliffs, and gullys than I expected. And some very colorful rock formations reminiscent of Death Valley. On day two, we took most of the side roads to the features there. Bob liked the “Newspaper Rock” petroglyph site the best. You could not get close to really examine the petroglyphs because they were at the bottom of a ravine, but the park had several telescopes set up so that you could look down there and see them. I got some photos of them with my 300 mm lens on the Canon 20d. We didn’t go all the way back to the first entrance where the best views of the Painted Desert are. I was just too tired to want to go back that far – Newspaper Rock was about half way back and that was as far back as we went. We were also getting low on diesel. From the park we drove into Holbrook, AZ which is a 16 mile trip. It’s a small town, and has a number of old buildings in its “old town” section that date back to Historic Route 66, and there are the ususal motels and fast food places just off I-40. An article on the internet notes that the town of Holbrook was singled out for its assistance in the credits of the movie “Cars.” The Visitors Center and Museum at the second entrance has an interesting display of dinosaur skeletons and a diorama of what the area would have looked like when the forests were there. Behind the building is a short trail leading out among many petrified stones – a great place for photo ops without having to hike miles.
Here are some of the sights at Petrified Forest:
