Whole Triassic conifer trunks turned to quartz and scattered across the Painted Desert, some of them a metre thick and shot through with amethyst and citrine. It is also a serious Triassic vertebrate site. Every year visitors take pieces and every year some mail them back with letters saying it brought them bad luck; the park keeps a file of them. LOOK ONLY, and the fine is real. Commercial petrified wood from private land outside the park is sold legally at the gates.
Petrified logs, Triassic reptiles · Late Triassic, ~225 mya
This ground is protected. Photograph it, record it, leave it where it lies. On US federal land the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act 2009 makes collecting vertebrate fossils an offence, and penalties are real.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
