The Painted Desert is a colorful area of badlands, made of stratified layers of siltstone, shale, and mudstone. The Painted Desert stretches from the Grand Canyon National Park to the Petrified Forest National Park, with a large portion lying within the Navajo Nation.
Petrified Forest National Park is one of the more underwhelming national parks I’ve visited. The history is mind blowing, but the actual views are a little less so. The petrified forest is a collection of fossilized fallen trees that lived in the Late Triassic Epoch, 225 million years ago.