Crystal Forest
— — a forest the desert turned to glass.
Not only on a wall.
“A short paved loop in the southern half of Petrified Forest National Park, in northeastern Arizona. The ground here is scattered with petrified logs full of quartz crystal — clear, amethyst, smoky, citrine — where the wood once was. Two hundred million years ago this was a floodplain of tall conifers. Volcanic ash buried the trunks, silica filled every cell, and the rest was time. The walk is about three-quarters of a mile, flat, painted-desert open in every direction. from the studio
Crystal Forest, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Crystal Forest is a 0.75-mile paved loop trail in the southern half of Petrified Forest National Park, about twenty miles east of Holbrook, Arizona, along U.S. Route 180. The name comes from the abundance of clear and coloured quartz crystals once visible inside the petrified logs scattered across the trail. The park was set aside as a national monument in 1906 and elevated to a national park in 1962, in part to protect these logs from a century of crystal poaching.
The logs at Crystal Forest are roughly 220 million years old, from the Late Triassic Chinle Formation. Tall conifers — Araucarioxylon arizonicum chief among them — fell, were buried by volcanic ash and river sediments, and slowly replaced cell by cell with silica drawn from the groundwater. Iron, manganese, and carbon impurities painted the quartz in red, purple, and black. Inside hollow trunks, true crystal pockets of amethyst and smoky quartz formed, the feature that gave the trail its name.
The park is open daily and crossed end to end by a 28-mile scenic road that links the Painted Desert in the north with the Rainbow Forest in the south. Crystal Forest sits near the southern end, between Jasper Forest and the Rainbow Forest Museum. The walk is flat and accessible. The park keeps a strict no-collecting rule — every visitor is reminded at the entrance, and bags are sometimes checked on exit. The petrified wood you take home should come from one of the certified shops in Holbrook.