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Petrified Forest National Park is Still Being Stolen One Piece at a Time

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Petrified log in Petrified Forest National Park. Photo by Moondigger via Wikipedia.

A decade ago, visitors at Petrified Forest National Park were stealing the park’s petrified wood at the rate of 12 tons a year. Warning signage, hefty fines, legal purchase options, and other countermeasures have done some good, but losses continue to mount. How much petrified wood is still leaving the park remains anybody’s guess.

Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, one of America’s most venerable parks, was established as Petrified Forest National Monument on December 8, 1906, by presidential proclamation. The park’s Painted Desert splendor, large size (147 square miles), and wilderness character make it a scenic delight and a wonderful venue for hiking and related recreation. But the thing that really excites people about this place, making it a magnet for over half a million visitors a year from all over America and the world, is the park’s large deposits of colorful petrified wood.

The park’s petrified wood was deposited around 225 million years old. The chain of events that produced these unusual deposits probably originated with a volcanic eruption that knocked down trees. The trees were subsequently washed into low-lying areas, became water-logged, and sank. The volcanic ash loaded the water with silica, which was then absorbed into the cells of the trees and solidified into multihued quartz that replaced the wood.

Sad to say, an awful lot of this colorful rock has been toted off in the handkerchiefs, pockets, packs, and gloveboxes of visitors over the years. Though it’s manifestly illegal, many people seem to believe that taking pretty fragments of the tan, purplish, and pink rock is not a serious transgression. They think “there’s lots of it, so taking a couple of souvenir pieces couldn’t hurt that much.” Of course, some who haul off petrified wood are serious thieves who sell what they steal.

Piece by piece, sometimes hundreds of pounds at a time, petrified wood continues to leave the park. Even if the 12 tons a year guesstimate is too high by an order or so of magnitude, the losses are still appalling. In some places in the park, the baseball- and softball sized pieces have already been carried off, leaving only pieces too large to carry or too small to bother with. In some of the more remote locations, visitors have used implements to attack larger pieces and hack off chucks small enough to easily transport.

Lyn Carranza, the park’s Chief of Interpretation/Public Information Officer, told me that countermeasures have stemmed the losses somewhat, but “theft remains a big problem.”

One problem is that the park is very large and contains two sprawling wilderness areas (over 52,000 acres) that lack maintained trails. Rangers are simply spread too thinly to make patrolling a highly effective remedy for the problem.

The countermeasures employed to date emphasize public education, signage, the threat of hefty fines, access restrictions, and legal purchase options. Park brochures and signage inform visitors that it’s illegal to disturb or remove the petrified wood in the park. As visitors exit the park, signage reminds them that theft of petrified wood is punishable by a hefty fine (currently over $300) and that cars are subject to search. Some people promptly get rid of their souvenirs when they see that signage. Each summer, rangers collect hundreds of pounds left behind this way.

Access cannot readily be restricted except in certain small areas of the park. On eight trails in developed areas, hiking and pedestrian traffic is restricted to the trail tread or designated walkway. Fencing is largely infeasible and used very scantily.

Making petrified wood souvenirs available for purchase is the most controversial of the countermeasures. As Ranger Carranza explained it to me, survey results implied that people would be much less likely to steal petrified wood if given a chance to buy it. The park’s concessionaire, the Fred Harvey Company (Xanterra), obtains petrified wood from legal sources and sells it on the park premises. Shops in the park vicinity also offer it for sale.

Getting legal supplies is a simple matter. About 90% of the petrified wood in northeastern Arizona is found outside the park, and much of it is on private land from which it can be collected and sold. (There are also petrified wood deposits on BLM, state of Arizona, and Navajo Nation land.)

Further research and monitoring will be needed to establish whether and to what degree the legal purchase option and other measures may reduce the theft of the park’s petrified wood. Meanwhile, management continues to hope that the theft problem will be brought within reasonable bounds.

Postscript: Conscience-smitten people often return petrified wood, sometimes even many months or years after it was taken from the park. Unfortunately, these returns can’t be restored to their original sites.

Comments

Bob:
Thank you for putting this message out there. The theft of resources from our parks is a serious problem. Hopefully NPT readers will spread the word!


Isn't there a senator from Arizona with a park-friendly record, and a House member who chairs a parks subcommittee, who might be able to get some additional rangers on the ground for this park?


Thanks for a good reminder about a long-standing problem.

There are plenty of tales about such thieves, including one man who was seen loading a hefty chunk of petrified wood in the trunk of his car. When contacted by a ranger, the guy's explanation for how the 60 pound piece of contraband got into the trunk was that his 4-year-old son must have put it there when dad wasn't looking.


I do hope the problem is solve in time, but in the mean time does anyone know what is going on in terms of expanding the park.


A synopsis of relevant information is available at http://www.nps.gov/pefo/parknews/park-boundary-expansion.htm. Here is a map that shows the authorized boundaries of the park: http://www.nps.gov/pefo/parknews/upload/Draft_singlecolor_map.pdf For more detailed information and updates you can contact the park's public information officer, Lyn Carranza at 928-524-6228.


Awesome


I remember going to the park when I was a teenager with my parents in the late 1960's or early 1970's and the grounds near the visiter center was nearly completely covered with petrified wood small enough a person could pick up. Then I went back in June of 2016 with my own family and was very distressed. I think in that time 75% of the petrified wood has been hauled off. I also saw a retail place on the road going to the park selling petrified wood I believe had more petrified wood than the park.


The park is 147 square miles with numerous roads running through it. Even if there was one ranger, per square mile, 24 hours a day ... it would be next to impossible to stop the theft.  It is simply too large and there is no way the national park system could even begin to afford this kind of added security.  Most National Parks run on a very low ranger to area ratio.  I was speaking with a ranger in Mesa Verde National Park this past summer (which is probably less than 1/2 the size of the Petrified Forest), and she said there were less than 20 rangers on duty at any given time.  Just quick, back of the envelope math, indicates that would be 1 ranger per every 3.5 square miles ... and it's rocky, desert, and mountainous terrain.


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