arizona, national parks, petrified forest

Petrified Forest: Teepees, Newspaper Rock, Puerco Pueblo

Published by

Caitlyn

on

April 25, 2025

After sweating our butts off a little bit on our exit-walk from Blue Mesa, we got back on Petrified Forest’s main park road and continued our journey toward the northern entrance of the park.

We’d been watching a thunderstorm roll in literally all day and I swore the rain was going to start any minute.

I had no expectations for what we’d find on the way, so it was really fun that it was these rainbow hills.

The Teepees

We also stopped here to find a cute little geocache. The hills exist on both sides of the road and you can just walk off and go wherever you want, in any direction, and get up close if you wanna.

The sign talks about Anne Montague Alexander and Louise Kellogg exploring this place in 1921, and how they came here because they thought the fossils John Muir found in ~1905 were really cool. And then those two ladies became the “pioneers of paleontology” of Petrified Forest. Girl power.

Newspaper Rock Petroglyphs Archeological District

Right after down the road is the parking lot for Newspaper Rock.

The only “newspaper rock” I’d heard of is in Moab, UT (which we’d see in a few days) so I was so confused and pleasantly surprised to find this little one here too.

You walk out on a sidewalk to an overlook, standing above a sandstone rock pile and looking out over desert badlands.

There are several stationary binoculars that guide you to where the petroglyphs are scratched into the rock.

This site has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1976. Apparently there are a metric TON of petroglyphs in the area that you’re overlooking from there, but these are the only visible ones from the platform.

Puerco Pueblo & Petroglyphs

We skipped along to the next parking lot. This one was for the Puerco ruins & petroglyphs, and this one has also been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1976.

This is an interpretive trail, leading you around to different stone ruins and more awesome examples of petroglyphs.

That’s an old Civilian Conservation Corps communications building in the back.

The sign explains that this village is a prehistoric settlement built by the Puebloan people out of sandstone blocks between 1280 and 1380. There are 100 rooms total and it used to be nestled along the Puerco River so they were super immersed in trade and had visitors coming to them from all over.

Then it talks about how the archeologists only dug up 1/3 of the ruins here, then they filled most of it back it to protect them from becoming further deteriorated.