
Stop 10: Who Cut the Wood?
Note: the image is not working right now.
Perhaps you’ve noticed the logs are sometimes broken into very regular sections that appear to be cut. Look up into the hill and you will see who is “cutting” the wood. The hill itself is doing the job!
It takes many, many stacked layers of dirt to make a hill. That is a lot of weight on top of the buried petrified logs. All that weight crushed and broke the logs.
Why the regularity in sections? A normal log does not break that way. But a petrified log does! Petrified wood is mostly silica-quartz minerals. The inner surfaces where they have broken are flat because quartz doesn’t break neatly across its crystal faces, so instead it snaps across the log’s shortest area—sort of like when you snap a piece of chalk.
Note: the image is not working right now.
Perhaps you’ve noticed the logs are sometimes broken into very regular sections that appear to be cut. Look up into the hill and you will see who is “cutting” the wood. The hill itself is doing the job!
It takes many, many stacked layers of dirt to make a hill. That is a lot of weight on top of the buried petrified logs. All that weight crushed and broke the logs.
Why the regularity in sections? A normal log does not break that way. But a petrified log does! Petrified wood is mostly silica-quartz minerals. The inner surfaces where they have broken are flat because quartz doesn’t break neatly across its crystal faces, so instead it snaps across the log’s shortest area—sort of like when you snap a piece of chalk.
Is there something we missed for this itinerary?
Itineraries across USA

Acadia

Arches National Park

Badlands

Big Bend

Biscayne

Black Canyon Of The Gunnison

Bryce Canyon

Canyonlands

Capitol Reef

Carlsbad Caverns

Channel Islands

Congaree

Crater Lake

Cuyahoga Valley

Death Valley

Dry Tortugas

Everglades

Gateway Arch

Glacier

Grand Canyon

Grand Teton

Great Basin

Great Smoky Mountains

Guadalupe Mountains

Haleakalā

Hawaiʻi Volcanoes

Hot Springs

Indiana Dunes

Isle Royale

Joshua Tree

Kenai Fjords

Kobuk Valley

Lassen Volcanic

Mammoth Cave

Mesa Verde

Mount Rainier

North Cascades

Olympic

Petrified Forest

Pinnacles

Rocky Mountain

Saguaro

Shenandoah

Theodore Roosevelt

Virgin Islands

Voyageurs

White Sands

Wind Cave

Yellowstone

Yosemite

Zion