For decades, the Petrified Forest National Park in eastern Arizona tried to discourage visitors from stealing its small pieces of petrified wood by saying the park loses 12 tons of the fossils per year.
But, as an Arizona Republic report explains, the park’s pilfering tale isn’t true. No one’s for sure how much petrified wood is spirited away at the park, but it certainly isn’t a ton per month.
Yes, visitors took some pieces of the wood, as the penitent proved with their letters and parcels. But they left most of it intact. Photographic comparisons found the most popular areas — Jasper Forest, Agate Bridge, Crystal Forest —all largely unchanged from years past. […]
Park officials began photographing sites long popular among visitors and then compared the pictures with photos from the past, sometimes as far back as a century.
There were no barren patches of desert. Most locations looked the same, down to individual pieces of petrified log. The myth of the missing wood wasn’t standing up to photographic scrutiny.
The park’s supervisor decided to own up to this tall tale and soften the approach so visitors would appreciate the park’s treasures, instead of treating people as potential thieves. Park rangers will prosecute for petrified-wood thefts, but the old approach tended to make law-abiding citizens feel unwelcome. In fact, studies determined the stealing tale actually was the least-effective message.
Whatever the park now is doing, it’s working — visits are up 30 percent in the past year.
The park never has ascertained when or how the 12-tons-a-year myth started. But it’s caused many guilt-stricken people to send letters and packages of the pilfered wood to the park since at least the 1930s — about the time the park became popularized by Route 66 going through its grounds. The Republic excerpted some of those anguished letters, including one that simply read: “Sorry for my father.”
Alas, the packages and letters of repentance may be heartfelt, but they cannot undo what’s been done:
The petrified forest is like a living record, one where time is measured in millions of years. To replace a piece of wood that had been removed would disrupt the record and potentially affect future research. Even if the person who took it knew the approximate location, its removal changed the setting too much.
So when a piece of wood is returned, the park files away the letter and puts the wood in a rusted metal box at the main office. When the box is full, a park ranger takes it to a service road closed to the public and empties it on an ever-growing pile of wood.
The park calls it the “conscience pile.” The size of a small car these days, it is where stolen wood finds a final resting place. There are no signs, nothing to memorialize it. Park officials seem almost reluctant to talk about it as they create their new story.
“There’s something tragic about it,” Thompson said. “People are sending things back, hoping to fix things that can’t be fixed.”
Perhaps the “conscience pile” will be enough to keep people from stealing the wood in the first place.
(Image of petrified wood in the Blue Mesa Log Tumble by T. Scott Williams, National Park Service)