18 of 22 – 2024 Fall Trip West Series. 10/7/24 Monday. After a quick visit to Walnut Canyon we drove to Petrified Forest National Park. We entered at the South Entrance and stopped first at the Rainbow Forest Museum/Visitors Center. This is a ‘drive through’ park with one 28 mile long road. Lots of places to pull over and take pictures or go for short hikes. The road is smooth in a few places… but mostly it is awful. Took us several hours to travel those very bumpy 28 miles.
The Visitors Center had some beautiful examples of polished petrified wood
Red petrified wood.
Even unpolished petrified wood is quite colorful.
Cactus. The only picture I have of something living in this very barren desert area.
There is a lot more than just petrified wood to see on the drive. Wild and unusual landforms and colors abound.
Petrified wood was just laying around everywhere.
While we were at this overlook toward the end of the drive, we saw another RV very similar to ours pull up. We enjoyed a brief meeting with the “rv_lifestyle_asianfamily” family and have followed their travels since on Facebook and Instagram.
Our RV on the right, Brenda & Tiger family on the left. Their Instagram is rv_lifestyle_asianfamilyThey took a picture too and posted to their Instagram; this is a screen capture of that post. We very seldom see another Axis/Vegas while driving so to have one pull up and park is cause for some celebration. Hats off to them traveling in a 25′ RV with a family of four and a dog.
One last picture as we were finishing the drive out of Petrified Forest NP. It was starting to get hazy so not a very good pic but that pyramid rock standing by itself was just weirdly interesting.
We stayed the night at Grants KOA in Grants, New Mexico. The campground was right next to an old lava flow. This pic was from the lava right at the entrance. Driving along US 40 the whole area just looked like desert to me with a few hills and ridges. I had no idea there were old volcanos around until we stopped to camp. The next morning we drove a very short distance to El Malpais National Monument.
Malpais is from Spanish, meaning “Badlands” (due to it’s location in the midst of volcanos and lava flows).
Topographic map of El Malpais. Volcano (Mt. Taylor) is in upper right. Various lava flows are the grays and black on the map. US 40 goes right between them.
The Visitors Center had some beautiful pottery.
We stayed the night at a big casino called Route 66 RV Resort which is on the outskirts of Albuquerque, NM. This was our most expensive night of camping the whole trip ($110) and possibly the hottest night too. It was hard to find reservations at campgrounds anywhere around Albuquerque because of the Balloon Fiesta.
DADart Photography 