Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument

About 34 million years ago a forest of giant redwoods grew in a valley here beside a lake, near an active volcanic center geologists call the Guffey volcano. Mudflows from its eruptions buried the lower trunks and turned the stumps to stone, while fine ash settling on the lake bed pressed leaves, insects and fish into layers of shale so thin they split like pages. The Florissant beds have yielded more than 1,700 described species of fossil insects and plants, among the richest records of their age anywhere.

Settlers found the stumps in the 1870s. Charlotte Hill, a homesteader, dug fossils from her land and sold them to visiting scientists, and later owners ran the stumps as roadside attractions, the Pike Petrified Forest and the Henderson Petrified Forest, selling specimens by the piece; one stump went to Disneyland in 1956. In the 1960s the valley was being subdivided for summer homes.

In the summer of 1969, with a bill for a national monument stalled in Congress and developers' bulldozers waiting, the paleobotanist Estella Leopold, Aldo Leopold's daughter, and the botanist Beatrice Willard organized the Defenders of Florissant. Their lawyers went to court four times in one summer to hold the line, and a group of local women prepared to sit in front of the machines. President Richard Nixon signed the bill on August 20, 1969, creating a 6,000-acre monument. Trails lead past the Big Stump and the Redwood Trio, and the 1878 Hornbek homestead stands near the entrance.