Qualla: The Petrified Forest

The Petrified Forest: Introduction

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jengod, CC BY-SA 4.0. She has been lying on her side for 3.4 million years. The Queen, as visitors know her, stretches sixty-five feet across the forest floor, eight feet wide at the base, her bark replaced cell by cell with silica until every ring and knot has turned to stone. She was two thousand years old when the volcano buried her. In Sonoma County's hills north of Calistoga, the Petrified Forest preserves a grove of ancient redwoods that were flash-entombed by a volcanic eruption during the Pliocene epoch, then slowly mineralized over millennia into the stone replicas that visitors walk among today. It is the only petrified forest in California from this period, and the Palynological Society has called it "one of the finest examples in the world of an ancient forest."

Read more: The Petrified Forest on Qualla

Image: Jengod | CC BY-SA 4.0

The Petrified Forest: Ghosts of a Warmer World

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lisa Robinson, CC BY-SA 4.0. The trees that became stone here tell a story about California's deep past. Three and a half million years ago, coast redwoods grew far inland, thriving in a climate warmer and wetter than today's. Diane Erwin of the University of California, Berkeley, confirmed in 2012 that the ...

Read more: The Petrified Forest on Qualla

Image: Lisa Robinson | CC BY-SA 4.0

The Petrified Forest: A Paleontologist, a Novelist, and a Forest

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah Stierch, CC BY 4.0. Yale paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh visited the petrified forest in 1870, identifying the stone trees as ancient sequoias. The site had been discovered the same year by Swedish homesteader Charles Evans, known as "Petrified Charley," who found a petrified log while raking h...

Read more: The Petrified Forest on Qualla

Image: Sarah Stierch | CC BY 4.0

The Petrified Forest: The Bockee Century

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lisa Robinson, CC BY-SA 4.0. Around 1912, Ollie Orre Bockee bought the forest and its surrounding land from M.C. Meeker for fourteen thousand dollars. Over the following years she expanded the property to 845 acres, and by 1914 she was charging tourists fifty cents to walk among the stone trees. Bockee ran t...

Read more: The Petrified Forest on Qualla

Image: Lisa Robinson | CC BY-SA 4.0

The Petrified Forest: Walking Among Stone Giants

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah Stierch, CC BY 4.0. The forest's petrified trees have acquired names over the years, lending personality to what might otherwise feel like a geology exhibit. The Queen remains the centerpiece: eight feet wide, sixty-five feet long, her stone surface polished by weather and time into something that l...

Read more: The Petrified Forest on Qualla

Image: Sarah Stierch | CC BY 4.0