Initially, I was going to maintain a journal with brief descriptions and photos of hikes within Petrified Forest National Park. This I would post on the Friends website as sort of a blog, hoping to encourage other folks to get off their butts and out of their cars, to turn their backs to the pavement and walk with only curiosity and desire for adventure as their guides. Turns out I’m not disciplined enough to do a blog.
The accompanying photos (in no particular sequence) resulted from sixteen outings so far in 2023. My wife Connie and I enjoy hiking alone, but we frequently invite friends along. Observing the thrill they experience seeing a stone tool or a particularly lovely pottery fragment or a hidden petroglyph gives us as much pleasure as if we had located the object ourselves. And how you might ask, does one find these things? You don’t. You muck around until the thing finds you.
2023 has not been a prime hiking year in PEFO. Through the first three months rain and snow fell more frequently and in greater abundance than usual; and precipitation in any form renders the bentonite clay terrain a sticky, slippery, sloppy mess.
In March alone four of the Park’s ten scheduled weekend guided hikes had to be canceled due to weather concerns. Recent weather has turned drier but also windier (it is spring, after all). Sometime soon, daytime temperatures will creep above 80, effectively ending our hiking season.
But we will be back in the fall, and I hope we meet you somewhere in the backcountry.
Gary Grube, Board Member