The Road West

Zuni, blue mesas, petrified trees, and a long road into the mountains.

I left Gallup with two stops in mind and not quite enough time for either.

The morning began with a cortado and oatmeal at a quiet downtown coffee shop. Then I returned to El Rancho, checked out, and headed toward Zuni Pueblo.

The visit was pleasant and understated. The old mission was the visual center, while parts of Zuni cosmology reminded me of Indigenous traditions in Mexico. What stayed with me most was an everyday scene: a woman selling burritos from a van as locals pulled beside her, greeted her, bought breakfast, and drove away—an improvised neighborhood drive-through.

An old adobe mission church beneath an intensely blue sky in Zuni Pueblo — The old mission · Zuni Pueblo

From Zuni, I continued to Petrified Forest National Park. At Blue Mesa, a short trail moved through blue, gray, and purple badlands formed from layers more than two hundred million years old. The colors felt almost improbable beneath the Arizona sky.

A path winding between striped blue and purple formations at Blue Mesa — Blue Mesa · Petrified Forest National Park

At Crystal Forest, fallen trees had become stone. Silica-rich water had slowly replaced their organic material, preserving grain, rings, and broken trunks in quartz. They looked familiar from a distance and impossible up close.

Long mineral-colored sections of petrified wood resting on desert ground — Trees turned to stone · Crystal Forest

Then the road climbed toward Flagstaff. In the space of one day, I had moved from Zuni stories to ancient sediment, from fossilized forests to living pines. The West kept changing scale.

From this day

VisitedPetrified Forest National Park