The Painted Desert

The banded badlands spreading north from this overlook are the Chinle Formation, laid down in the Late Triassic and cut open by the Little Colorado's drainage over millions of years. The colors come from iron minerals staining soft mudstone and claystone, with harder ledges of sandstone standing out in soberer grays. Beneath the tie-dyed hills lies one of the richest fossil beds in the world, a record of an age when giant amphibians and early reptiles moved through a wetter, forested land. The petrified logs scattered across the park are pieces of that vanished world.

What the plaque says

The Painted Desert stretches before you as an outdoor museum of fossilized plants and animals. Its striking colors emanate from the Chinle Formation of the Late Triassic, which has been eroded by the Little Colorado River drainage system., An aerial view of the Painted Desert reveals corrugated hills of highly colored sedimentary rock, mostly soft, fine-grained mudstone and claystone. Also present are harder beds of siltstone, sandstone, and conglomerate. The wide range of reddish color in these rocks is due to the presence of iron minerals., The Chinle Formation is a storehouse of plant and animal fossils.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Petrified Forest National Park — 8.1 mi
  Two hundred million years turned to stone — and a Route 66 ghost
• Holbrook — 23 mi
  A Santa Fe railroad town once too tough for women and churches, now the seat of Navajo County, gateway to the Petrified Forest, and home to the concrete teepees of the Wigwam Motel.

More markers nearby

• Painted Desert Community Complex — 1.2 mi
• Painted Desert Inn — 1.6 mi
• Summer Solstice Marker — 6.1 mi
• Newspaper Rock Petroglyphs — 7.0 mi