To the surprise of many, the great naturalist John Muir spent a year exploring the Petrified Forest in eastern Arizona. Author Scott Thybony set out to learn more about Muir and his desert wanderings. He tells the story in this month’s Canyon Commentary.
An escarpment overlooks the banded blues and reds of an expansive badlands in Petrified Forest National Park. Skirting the rim, I spot the lid from a tea tin common during the early 1900s. “Lipton’s Tea,” it reads.
The tin, tossed away by a sightseer long ago, has me thinking about the great naturalist John Muir who had explored the area. Born in Scotland, he retained his brogue and his fondness for tea. On his treks in the Yosemite backcountry he claimed to have carried “only a tin cup, a handful of tea, a loaf of bread, and a copy of Emerson.”
In 1905 Muir began wandering through Petrified Forest still mourning the death of his wife. At 67-years old, he went to the desert to overcome his deep sorrow and to save the life of his daughter. In August Louie Muir, his great love, had died of lung cancer. He feared his youngest daughter would soon follow. Helen, 19-years old, was unable to shake off the lingering effects of pneumonia, and her doctor suggested the Arizona cure. Muir agreed, believing nights spent under the starry skies would be healing. With Helen and his oldest daughter Wanda, he headed to the stark badlands of the Painted Desert.
They stepped off the train at the railway station of Adamana, the jump-off point for the Petrified Forest. Checking in to the Forest Hotel, they were escorted to a green adobe house with two rooms where they would live for nearly a year. In the high, dry air of the desert Helen soon began to recover and would go on to lead a full life.
Unable to write, Muir explored. The stone trees fascinated him. Noticing the lack of branches on the mineralized logs, he accurately concluded the trees had been transported by floodwaters. Buried in river deposits, they slowly petrified. The naturalist recorded his observations, but never published an account of what he described as “the first great forests of the world.”
His desert explorations came as a surprise when I first learned about them. I could easily imagine Muir disappearing for days in the alpine wilderness of the High Sierra. But I had trouble thinking of him wandering through the desert among a forest of tumbled stone trees. And fossils.
Finding fragments of fossil bone, Muir learned they came from phytosaurs, a reptile resembling a crocodile but unrelated. The naturalist was also intrigued by the traces of a people who had lived in the area centuries earlier. His scientific curiosity drew him to the rock art found on boulders and cliff faces. He tried interpreting the enigmatic symbols with more enthusiasm than success.
During an excavation at the prehistoric site of Puerco Pueblo, he uncovered a sand-buried kiva. He hauled his finds back to the hotel where he developed the first chronology of the region based on pottery types. At the same time he was collecting pots, the staunch conservationist was lobbying Congress to pass the Antiquities Act of 1906 to protect archeological sites.
He donated his specimens to the University of California at Berkeley, where he spent long hours studying them on his visits back home. Muir found the work tough on what he called his “old paleontological body,” and the research a solitary endeavor. “I sit silent and alone,” he wrote in a letter, “from morn til eve in the deeper silence of the enchanted old forests …”
A year spent in the Petrified Forest renewed his passion for the natural world. He recovered from his great loss and returned to California with his daughters in August, 1906. With his spirit finally restored John Muir began to write again, using his voice to preserve the last wild places.
Scott Thybony is a Flagstaff-based writer. His Canyon Commentaries are produced by KNAU Arizona Public Radio and air on the last Friday of each month.
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