Petrified Forest Newspaper Rock close
— — six hundred marks left on one stone by people who stayed.
Not only on a wall.
“A single sandstone boulder on the Painted Desert plateau, covered in more than six hundred petroglyphs cut by Ancestral Puebloan hands between roughly 650 and 2,000 years ago. The view is from the overlook above; the trail down was closed in the 1990s to protect the surface. Spotting scopes are mounted at the rail. From a distance the rock reads as one quiet conversation that nobody has finished. — from the studio
Petrified Forest Newspaper Rock close, 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.
Newspaper Rock is a large sandstone boulder on the Painted Desert plateau inside Petrified Forest National Park, in Apache County, Arizona. It sits at roughly 5,479 feet of elevation along the main park road, about six miles south of the Painted Desert Visitor Center off Interstate 40. The boulder face holds more than 650 individual petroglyphs cut by Ancestral Puebloan people who lived in the region between roughly 650 CE and the early 1400s. The park itself was set aside as a national monument in 1906 and elevated to a national park in 1962.
The rock is Triassic Chinle Formation sandstone, the same red-and-buff layer that holds most of the park's petrified wood. The petroglyphs were pecked through the dark desert varnish on the boulder's south face to expose the lighter stone beneath. Motifs include spirals, bighorn sheep, lizards, human figures, hand prints, and a set of geometric symbols whose meaning is no longer known with any certainty. The downhill viewing trail was closed in the mid-1990s after decades of foot traffic began to damage the surface; today the rock is viewed only from the upper overlook.
The overlook is a short paved path from the parking pull-off on the main park road. Two free park spotting scopes are mounted at the rail; the petroglyphs are too small to read clearly with the naked eye from the viewing distance. The park is open daily except December 25, with entrance fees collected at the north and south entrances along Interstate 40 and US 180. Photographs of the rock face come out best in late afternoon when raking sunlight crosses the varnished surface and the carvings throw small shadows.