Jessamyn Goes Places

For the first stop on my trip with my mom we went to Petrified Forest National Park. It takes like 40 minutes to drive through the park one-way (it’s not a loop), and my mom thought we’d just stay around the north part where we came in, but I wanted to see the whole thing. The north part had some views of mesa’s that were ok. The middle of the park was pretty amazing and had what they called a blue mesa, where there were hills of rock with layers of blue and purple that were sooo pretty. This was definitely my favorite part of the park. Some of the mesas had pieces of petrified wood strewn about on them.  We drove to another area called the jasper forest, which had a ton of petrified wood. There was a park ranger there who talked with us for a while. I learned that the land used to be a river and when trees fell they were covered by silt. Over years, silica-enriched groundwater seeped into the logs and replaced the wood with quartz. When the Colorado Plateau was uplifted, it brough...

 On Thursday we headed to Capitol Reef National Park. The whole area is full of beautiful, layered, red rock formations. On the way to the visitor center we stopped at a viewpoint. In the picture above, you can see chimney rock all the way to the left. We went to the visitor center to pick up a guided tour of the park's scenic drive, but we stopped to watch a short documentary about the park. It was probably made in the 2000s and every time they showed reenactments of people living in the park, they made the people transparent, which Duncan thought was very funny. We headed on the scenic drive, which had numbered stops, and the guide we bought described each stop. It mainly talked about the rock formations, what the layers were and how they were formed. Duncan was a big fan of the guide and he said we learned more about this park than any other.  One of the stops had a very distant view of an arch called the Cassidy Arch because there are some (unsubstantiated) reports that th...