Rewriting the story of Arizona's petrified forest

HOLBROOK – The first letter turned up at Petrified Forest National Monument in 1935 all the way from Budaun, India. It was addressed to "The Officer in Charge."

" Dear Sir ," it began, the words written in a neat cursive script.

About three years ago, I was indirectly responsible for the removal of a small piece of petrified wood from the national reserve forest and it has been in my possession since that time.

You may smile at me and think me a bit foolish — but I have always been a law-abiding citizen and it has troubled me to have something in my possession that is not mine. So I am returning it to you under separate cover and hope it will reach you safely.

The piece appeared not long after. Light brown, streaked with pink and white and a dull orange, it was barely the size of a child's fist.

Over the months and years that followed, more letters arrived and more petrified wood, some of it in pieces as small as the first, others larger and more colorful. The letters spilled over with remorse and guilt, tales of bad luck and misfortune. Most asked the park to return the wood to its original location, though only a few provided specific directions.

The returned wood might have become a charming footnote for the park, but as the pile grew, it helped feed a more modern story about the loss of resources from the monument, which became a national park in 1962. Visitors — the story went — were swiping a ton of petrified wood a month, 12 tons a year. Before long, according to the stories, the park would be barren. Maybe it already was in places.

Park officials lent heft to the story with increasingly stringent enforcement measures: Vehicle inspections at the entrance and exit gates. Grim posters and pamphlets warning visitors at every turn. Road and trail closures that blocked access to wood-strewn hills.

All for a story that wasn't true.

Yes, visitors took some pieces of the wood, as the penitent proved with their letters and parcels. But they left most of it intact. Photographic comparisons found the most popular areas — Jasper Forest, Agate Bridge, Crystal Forest —all largely unchanged from years past.

Worse, the park was conveying its message in the worst way possible, according to social-science researchers, admonishing visitors at every turn. The story of the missing wood had cast a shadow over one of the West's great landscapes.

Four years ago, a new superintendent decided the park needed to rewrite the story of the petrified forest, shift the focus away from the alleged wood thefts and back to the wood itself, to the fossils and a historic record that stretches back 225 million years.

"We had to start by tackling the biggest issue, the issue of wood theft, in some different manner," said Brad Traver, the park's superintendent. "Then we needed to replace that story with something else, with all the rest of the things that are going on here. People think the wood has been stolen for so long at such a great rate that it's all gone. That's a perception we have to change."

To whom it may concern,

During my visit to the Petrified Forest, I took the enclosed rock. It was wrong, but I didn't think one small rock would make a difference.

However, my parents have helped me to understand that it doesn't matter how small it is, and is still wrong.

Sincerely,

Ryan. (Age 11)

Like any good scientist, Bill Parker, the paleontologist at Petrified Forest National Park, has devised a way to explain what he does to non-scientists, in his case the almost incomprehensible timeline of the petrified forest.

First you have to imagine Tyrannosaurus rex as a paleontologist digging in the Arizona desert during the Cretaceous period about 66 million years ago. If he had dug enough, he would have encountered the same petrified wood now exposed by eons of erosion.

"He could have studied these same fossils and this same wood," Parker said. "Those logs out there were stone when he lived. There's less time between us and the T. rex than when the T. rex was alive and those trees were alive. This is deep time we're talking about."

Deep back in time, in the early Triassic period more than 220 million years ago, what is now northeastern Arizona was a different place, lush and humid, a subtropical lowland. Reptiles and amphibians flourished. Great rivers flowed through forests of coniferous trees that towered 100 and 200 feet high.

As in any forest, trees fell, sometimes in violent tropical storms. Flooding rivers buried the trees in layers of mud. Volcanic ash, high in silica, added layers. So deeply buried were the trees that they did not decompose naturally.

The wood absorbed the silica and other minerals dissolved by groundwater and over hundreds of thousands of years, the minerals crystallized and replaced the plant material as the trees decayed slowly. The minerals preserved the minute details of the wood as the trees turned to fossils. Different kinds of minerals added color.

Erosion slowly exposed the now-petrified wood, which then led scientists to the crowded portrait of the Triassic period, the amphibians and dinosaurs that emerged and went extinct over the 20 million years preserved in the rocks.

"In each layer, we find fossils," Parker said. "Animals, plants, trunks of trees, freshwater mussels, snails. You can use this to start to build your story and see what it was like once."

Hello!

According to family lore … one of my late husband's late relatives made a trip to your fine park and felt compelled to bring back a souvenir. Near as I can tell, this trip happened in the late 40s or early 50s AND having known my late in-laws fairly well this would not have been a purchased souvenir. In-as-much as I am a law-abiding citizen of the United States, I feel compelled to return this piece of the Petrified Forest to its former resting place.

Yours truly,

Sue Ann

The petrified forest reveals its own stories on an undulating canvas of sedimentary layers deposited over millions of years. Wind and water sculpted the rocks, splashing the hills with the dark red of the siltstones and the gray, blue and purple of the mudstones, a bright palette the human eye can't resist.

It was the otherworldly landscape and the wood that drew the first visitors, who found hardy entrepreneurs already peddling chunks of the wood as souvenirs. Even then, people realized the supply of wood wasn't endless and in 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt set aside an area near Holbrook as a national monument.

The arrival of Route 66 through Arizona helped turn the monument into a popular attraction for motoring tourists. In 1936, "The Petrified Forest," a noirish suspense thriller set in a rundown diner on the edge of the monument, added to the cultural allure. The film starred Leslie Howard and Bette Davis, both big stars at the time, but it proved to be a breakout performance for its fifth-billed player, Humphrey Bogart.

Souvenir stands hawking petrified wood lined the roads outside the monument, drawing their wares from nearby parcels of private land. But visitors still succumbed to the temptation of pocketing a chunk during their visit inside the park boundaries. Who wouldn't want a shard broken from a painted desert to display back in the city?

As reports grew of wood theft, park officials tried to raise awareness of the laws that forbade taking items from within the monument. Signs went up, violators were prosecuted, vehicles were inspected going in and out.

At some point, the park began talking about losing 1 ton of wood a month to theft. That may have marked the point where a trip to the petrified forest became a guilt trip.

"Nobody could pinpoint the origin of the 'We're losing a ton of wood a month' myth," said Richard Ullmann, director of interpretation and education at the park.

"Our messaging inadvertently made people feel like criminals. People would leave the park and we'd say, 'You didn't take anything, did you?' It's a bad last impression to leave on the vast majority of folks who didn't take anything except pictures."

Dear Park Rangers,

Here's your rock back. We never should have taken it. Maybe now the Giants will win a few games next year.

In 2006, a team of researchers led by an Arizona State University psychology professor examined how people reacted to different kinds of messages intended to change behavior. Did it matter how the messages were framed, the researchers asked? Would a warning work better if the approach changed?

One of the experiments was conducted at Petrified Forest National Park, where the researchers tested the wording on signs meant to stop theft of petrified wood. In the end, the researchers found that the least-effective message, one that emphasized the idea that visitors were stealing a lot of wood, was the message used by the park.

In other words, the study concluded the park was doing it wrong. At the time, park officials decided not to change their approach. But Traver, the current superintendent, began turning the messages around almost as soon as he arrived.

"The focus was not very welcoming," he said. "If people are always feeling they are looking over their shoulder, to see if someone is watching them to see if they're going to pick up wood, they're not going to feel welcome."

As the park turned away from its wary past, the basis for some of its old suspicions began to crumble. Park officials began photographing sites long popular among visitors and then compared the pictures with photos from the past, sometimes as far back as a century.

There were no barren patches of desert. Most locations looked the same, down to individual pieces of petrified log. The myth of the missing wood wasn't standing up to photographic scrutiny.

Traver said the park hasn't become any less vigilant about wood theft, but the message has changed. The park urges visitors to "do the right thing" and suggests that most people don't take wood. Park literature subtly pushes the idea that the thefts were never destructive, with headlines like "More spectacular than ever."

Over the past year, attendance at the park increased by over 30 percent and is on track to reach 900,000 this year. Cheaper gas could account for some of the growth, but Traver believes the park is reaching more visitors with its renewed emphasis on its historic — and prehistoric — resources, as well as its move to reopen long-closed trails.

The park's scientists work regularly with researchers from around the country, including the Smithsonian Institution. The park has played important roles in several recent discoveries that shed new light on dinosaurs and other creatures that lived in the region during the Triassic period. Field work has unearthed new plant and animal species.

Matt Smith, the park's museum curator and a paleontology researcher, spends part of his day in the lab, working on fossils collected at various sites, sorting through tiny bones, looking for similarities and differences.

Dinosaurs have driven the park's narrative on science for years and its highest-profile discoveries in recent years have sprung from the paleontology work. But the park's historic collections include more-recent finds from human settlements: shards of pottery, baskets, arrow points and tools dating back 10,000 years.

"There's one area on the south end where there was once a playa, where water would collect," Smith said. "People would sit there and make points from pieces of petrified wood. They were using it back then."

He opened drawer after drawer in the collections room, parts of a story the park wants to share with visitors, a story that was often obscured by the attention, however well-meaning, to disappearing wood.

"This was one of the first parks set aside by the government for scientific purposes," Smith said. "We realized by focusing on the wood, were were missing out on so much else. There are a lot of layers to this onion."

Dear Petrified Forest National Park,

Removing this rock was a terrible mistake. I didn't believe in the curse that came with removing this, but now I believe in bad luck and hope that this piece of history can be returned to its original location. I would like to apologize to the park rangers, future visitors, my parents and friends and most importantly, to the old powerful spirit that looks up through and will expand the great wilderness of the USA.

Sincerely,

An additional "bad luck" believer

P.S. Some things had to be learned the hard way.

Ryan Thompson was in Arizona about four years ago, researching a project about meteorites and rocks that are wrongly identified as meteorites. He was interested in why people want to ascribe power to geologic material and what happens when a rock is just a rock again.

He had some free time and used it to visit Petrified Forest. In the south visitors center, he saw a display of letters from people who had stolen pieces of petrified rock and then returned them and the idea piqued his interest. Here was another group of people finding meaning in a rock.

After reading through hundreds of letters, he decided he wanted to share them in a book, presenting the letters and pictures of returned rocks as a piece of art and snapshot of the culture. He and co-author Phil Orr published "Bad Luck, Hot Rocks" last year.

One letter still stands as a powerful statement. It was hastily scrawled, one line:

Sorry for my father.

"It's a powerful sentiment, to apologize for relatives, your father, the people who have come before us," he said. "To understand the trail of destruction and to do better. If only we could fix what we've done to the earth."

Early in his research, Thompson discovered what he saw as the great irony of the letters and the fervent wishes to restore the stolen wood: It can't be done.

The petrified forest is like a living record, one where time is measured in millions of years. To replace a piece of wood that had been removed would disrupt the record and potentially affect future research. Even if the person who took it knew the approximate location, its removal changed the setting too much.

So when a piece of wood is returned, the park files away the letter and puts the wood in a rusted metal box at the main office. When the box is full, a park ranger takes it to a service road closed to the public and empties it on an ever-growing pile of wood.

The park calls it the "conscience pile." The size of a small car these days, it is where stolen wood finds a final resting place. There are no signs, nothing to memorialize it. Park officials seem almost reluctant to talk about it as they create their new story.

"There's something tragic about it," Thompson said. "People are sending things back, hoping to fix things that can't be fixed. For me, as an artist, that pile becomes this amazing monument to the whole phenomenon. It's kind of a beautiful reminder of the problems inherent in resource management."

They are beautiful, but I can't enjoy them —

They weigh like a ton of bricks on my conscience.

Sorry.