s another side to the Petrified Forests besides a
prehistoric, geologic one. Split one of the big or little pieces of
petrified wood open, and you find pure onyx, pure agate, the colors of
the rainbow, which every youngster has tried to catch in its hands,
caught by a Master Hand and transfixed forever in the eternal rocks.
Crosswise, the split shows the concentric circles of the wood grain in
blues and purples and reds and carmines and golds and lilacs and
primrose pinks. Split the stone longitudinally and you have the same
colors in water-waves brilliant as a diamond, hard as a diamond, so hard
you can only break it along the grain of the ancient wood, so hard,
fortunately, that it almost defies man-machinery for a polish. This
hardness has been a blessing in disguise; for before the Petrified
Forests were made by Act of Congress a National Park, or Monument, the
petrified wood was exploited commercially and shipped away in carloads
to be polished. You can see some shafts of the polished specimens in any
of the big Eastern museums; but it was found that the petrified wood
required machinery as expensive and fine as for diamonds to effect a
hard polish, and the thing was not commercially possible; so the
Petrified Forests will never be vandalized.

You lunch under a natural bridge formed by the huge shaft of a prone
giant, and step off more fallen pillars to find lengths greater than 130
feet, and seat yourself on stump ends of a rare enough beauty for an
emperor's throne; but always you come back to the first pleasures of a
child--picking up the smaller pebbles, each pebble as if there had been
a sun shower of rainbow drops and each drop had crystallized into
colored diamonds.

I said don't go to the Petrified Forests expecting a big thrill. Yet if
you have eyes that really see, and go there after a rain when every
single bit of rock is ashine with the colors of broken rainbows; or go
there at high noon, when every color strikes back in spangles of
light--there is something the matter with you if you don't have a big
thrill with a capital "B."

There is another pleasure on your trip to the Petrified Forests, which
you will get if you know how, but completely miss if you don't. All
these drivers to the Forests are old-timers of the days when Arizona was
a No-Man's-Land. For instance, Al Stevenson, the custodian at Adamana,
was one of the men along with Commodore Owen of San Diego and Bert
Potter of the Forestry Depa