Petrified Forest National Park is an easy drive from Durango that took us past Shiprock, NM—which always seem to be mentioned in Tony Hillerman novels—down the old stage road to Gallup and then across part of the remainder of Route 66 to the Park, which is just across the Arizona boarder. Here we found the Painted Desert, fabulous pictographs left in the 13th C. by he same Native American groups that lived in the Mesas to the north, and, of course, the petrified tree trunks that are randomly strewn across the prairie. Because this is a big park and we are in off-season, we were able to be quite alone out on these arid grasslands with nothing but the wind and these ancient relics of earlier times.