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Petrified Forest National Park Orientation
Video: Today, Petrified Forest National Park
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is a barren land. But 225 million years ago, this landscape
was much different. Huge trees reached into the skies 200 feet.
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And below, the first dinosaurs roamed the
land. Come explore the Petrified Forest, America's
very real Triassic park.
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Phoebe Judge: Four hours northeast of Phoenix,
in what can only be called the middle of nowhere,
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sits the Petrified Forest National Park. What we're hearing is the orientation video
from the visitor center.
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Petrified Forest National Park Orientation
Video: What separates these lands from all
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others is petrified wood, bejeweled with quartz
crystals, agate, jasper, amethyst, and other
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semiprecious gems. Nowhere else is there such a great collection
of exposed, colorful fossil trees.
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Phoebe Judge: Petrified wood isn't actually
wood. It's rock, the fossilized remains of trees
that fell millions of years ago.
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So it's wood that's turned into rock. And this park in Arizona has the greatest
concentration of petrified wood on the planet,
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125,000 acres full of beautiful looking 200
million-year-old stuff. And not surprisingly, sometimes people take
a piece home with them, a little souvenir.
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Petrified Forest National Park Orientation
Video: The temptation to possess a piece of
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petrified wood has decimated this irreplaceable
resource. Park Protection Officer (in video): Can I
have you step over to the car please?
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Petrified Forest National Park Orientation
Video: Taking anything from the park is illegal.
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It is a federal offense punishable by fines
and or imprisonment. Phoebe Judge: The park estimated they were
losing one ton of petrified wood each month,
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most of it smuggled out in people's pants. Melissa Holes: I am the ruiner of vacation.
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We've actually joked about making T-shirts. My job is to ruin some people's vacation,
is what they claim.
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Phoebe Judge: This is Melissa Holes, a protection
officer for the park. So when was the last time you caught someone
trying to steal wood?
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Melissa Holes: 45 minutes ago —
Phoebe Judge: Is it — Melissa Holes: ... was the last time I caught
someone taking petrified wood.
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Yes. Phoebe Judge: So it happens all the time? Melissa Holes: All the time. Phoebe Judge: So what do you do?
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I mean, are you, like, secretly watching them,
or do you get a call? Melissa Holes: Yes.
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Phoebe Judge: You're secretly watching? Melissa Holes: Yes. [Laughing.] Sometimes we're in plainclothes.
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Sometimes we're in uniform. But we do a lot of foot patrol. So we are an active presence on the trails.
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But we are also up on hilltops with binoculars
watching for specific human behavior that
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guilty people exhibit. Phoebe Judge: What is guilty petrified-wood-stealing
behavior?
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Melissa Holes: Guilty behavior. Let's see. Most people when they're hiking on a trail
don't look around them, front and back, and
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then bend over really slowly [laughter] and
drag something from the ground up their pant
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leg and put it in their pocket. Phoebe Judge: [Laughing.] So it's they're trying to be really sly about
it?
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Melissa Holes: They're trying to be sly. Keyword is trying. Phoebe Judge: Park staff set up checkpoints
so no car could leave the park without an
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inspection. They instituted fines, $250 for anyone caught
with wood, no warnings.
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Still, the wood theft continued. And park staff found themselves taking it
kind of personally.
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They didn't want to be the mean park, the
surveillance park, the park begging you to
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please behave like an adult and just not steal
the petrified wood. But, apparently, we're all a bunch of toddlers.
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And when we're told we can't have something,
we want it so much more. I'm Phoebe Judge.
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This is Criminal. [Music.] What happens when you see the father with
his little kids who has taken the wood and
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you have to go up and say, "Excuse me, sir,"
and there are like kids there? Melissa Holes: Unfortunately, in my experience,
it's not the kids doing it.
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It's daddy taking it and blaming it on the
kids because he doesn't think I'm going to
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cite the 5-year-old, which I'm not. But then I have to pull the father aside and
say, "Why don't you try being a parent and
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stop blaming this on the kid? I know the kid didn't do it." Phoebe Judge: The superintendent of Petrified
Forest National Park is Brad Traver.
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He says they try to give visitors plenty of
opportunities to do the right thing.
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Brad Traver: We put a sign on the road as
you approach the exit station saying that
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there would be an inspection ahead. That's a relatively passive thing for us to
do.
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And we still collect pieces of petrified wood
between that sign and the entrance station
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every month. Phoebe Judge: Do people just say, "Oh no,
there's going to be inspection," and then
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they get it out of their car? Brad Traver: They throw it out the window. Yeah. Phoebe Judge: Really?
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So —
Brad Traver: Oh, yeah. Phoebe Judge: So you have a lot in this one
little stretch?
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Brad Traver: Yes. In that little hundred yards or whatever it
is, there isn't any petrified wood that occurs
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naturally. So anything that's sitting on the ground there
is thrown out the window.
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Phoebe Judge: Park staff was working very
hard to scare and shame visitors into doing
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the right thing. And you could say that their tactics did end
up working. Just not in the way they'd intended.
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Matt Smith: So like last week for whatever
reason was kind of a heavy week. I think we got four or five packages of wood
and letters returned.
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Phoebe Judge: The wood is coming back. Matt Smith: The wood itself is incredibly
heavy and dense.
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And so a lot of the times, they've been tumbled
around and the boxes are a little bit beat
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up. Phoebe Judge: This is Matt Smith, museum curator
at the park. For decades, people who've stolen wood have
reported strange happenings, immediate bad
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luck like getting fired or suddenly hurting
yourself. They get so scared, they send the stolen wood
back to the park, and they also send letters.
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Matt Smith: The first letter we got was back
in 1934 from a man who I believe was living
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in India. And he mailed back a piece of wood and a letter
and said that he had had some bad luck, and
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felt guilty and thought that the wood might
have something to do with it. And he sent it back.
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Phoebe Judge: And they still come all the
time. And it's part of Matt Smith's job to open
them up and see what the person has to say.
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Matt Smith: I'm just going to grab a handful
here... [Sound of papers rustling.]
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And pull them out. Let's see. We've got one that says, "Dear Superintendent,
Please return these petrified rocks to the
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forest. I took these over 20 years ago as a teenager. I'm very sorry. Thank you."
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Phoebe Judge: The park took advantage of this
and put the letters on display as a warning.
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If visitors didn't care about doing the right
thing or getting a $250 ticket, maybe they
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would care about being cursed. Matt Smith: "I visited the park many years
ago and read the museum bad luck stories on
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display. I am not superstitious. Well, now I am. My wife purchased this rock many years ago."
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[Laughing.] OK, so he bought it. That means it was legal. "I never had bad luck until I married her.
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We are good people and never do wrong to anybody. But bad things keep happening to her, and
thus bad things happen to me by proxy.
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Unduly kicked out of college. Identity theft. Institutions lost our documents. Health problems.
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Loss of pregnancy, unexplicable. Lost jobs without a real reason, just not
a good fit.
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And many more bad and sad things. Please restore this to its rightful place. Thank you."
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And they gave their names. Phoebe Judge: Matt read us letter after letter. Listening to them, it's hard to work out why
exactly people were so sorry, Or where they
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would get the idea that stealing petrified
wood causes bad luck... Unless they got the idea from the park itself
from all of the other letters the park has
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on display in its museum. So maybe people are cursed. Or maybe they just want to participate.
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But with a lot of the letters, you get the
feeling that the person writing isn't happy
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for some reason, and this is their small way
of making something right. Matt Smith: Let's see.
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I've got a letter here printed in maybe 40
font or something. It's really big letters.
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It says, "I found these rocks at a house I
lived in and wanted to return them to where
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they belong. Thanks." I remember this, and there were, yeah, two
small chunks of petrified wood, but then there
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was a big Ziploc bag full of shells from Florida. And it was just seashells. So I don't know how we got that.
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Phoebe Judge: You might think the park staff
would be heartened to see people coming to
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their senses and returning the stolen wood. But when a piece of wood is returned, Rangers
can't just go toss it randomly into the park.
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They can't verify where it came from. And since they do receive things definitely
not from the park, like a bag of seashells,
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they don't take any chances. So returned wood just gets chucked into a
pile, an actual pile.
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Here's Park Superintendent Brad Traver. Brad Traver: So the conscience pile is a collection
of petrified wood that comes to the park from
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sources sometimes unknown, sometimes known,
that we don't know where to put. [Laughs.]
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Phoebe Judge: The conscience pile is now the
size of a pickup truck and sits down a service
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road at the far end of the park, like a sort
of monument to guilt and superstition.
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[Music.] The story we've just told was the whole story
for a long time. Horrible wood theft, one ton a month.
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The park was disappearing. And the steady stream of conscience letters
was part of the proof.
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Finally, someone said, "Hang on. Where did we get that one ton number?" Matt Smith: And then we started looking at
the metrics that we had about the wood theft,
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this ton a month figure. And we realized that in the vast majority,
there was no evidence of large amounts of
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theft. And, yeah, just all this sort of information
started to not quite stack up.
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And we realized that there was almost a mythology
built around the wood theft. Phoebe Judge: From here, the park brought
in researchers to evaluate the situation.
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They pulled out archival photos of what the
park looked like in the late 1800s, and then
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sent a photographer to photograph the exact
same places today. They did this more than 200 times.
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Matt Smith: As far as the camera's eye can
see, we cannot detect much of a difference
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between photos taken a hundred years ago and
today, and that the experiences that your
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grandparents had are almost exactly like what
you're having today. And, in fact, some cases, there's more wood
exposed now than there was in the photographs
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that your grandparents took. And when your rate of erosion exceeds your
rate of resource theft, you're probably doing
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a really good job. [Laughs.] Phoebe Judge: The new researchers also study
the park signs and language and found that
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all of the tough guy stuff was having the
opposite effect. It was sending the message that the wood was
disappearing really quickly, so you better
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hurry and get yours before it's all gone forever. In the past few years, they've toned it down.
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They no longer play that dramatic orientation
video. They've stopped threatening to arrest people.
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And the new approach is paying off. Visitors to the park are on the rise. Brad Traver: We don't want to be the park
that says, "Did you steal any petrified wood?
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Are you sure you didn't steal any petrified
wood? Did you see anybody else steal any petrified
wood?"
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That's not the kind of visitor experience
we want people to have when they come, when
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they leave Petrified Forest National Park. We need to be, our first priority needs to
be protecting the resources that we are charged
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with protecting. But we don't have to do it in a way that is
unpleasant. We don't have to do it in a way that's even
very public.
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Phoebe Judge: We should be clear, people are
still stealing wood. Officer Melissa Holes deals with them every
day.
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Melissa Holes: I had a foreign individual
who was well-endowed who was trying to get
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away with putting the smaller pieces of petrified
wood in her cleavage. [Laughter.]
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And she did not speak a lot of English, but
she was completely compliant and cooperative
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when I contacted her. And I said I knew where the petrified wood
was, and I needed it back.
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And before I could explain how I was going
to search her, she started undressing in the
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middle of the parking lot to give me back
the petrified wood. Phoebe Judge: [Laughing.]
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Just massive amounts came down out of her
chest? Melissa Holes: Yes, very much so.
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[Laughs.] Phoebe Judge: But this isn't the crisis they
thought it was. It's more of a nuisance.
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As for the conscience letters, they aren't
on display in the park museum anymore.
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They've put that narrative behind them. But you and I can still see some of them,
thanks to a photographer named Ryan Thompson.
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Ryan Thompson: And it starts just straight
away, "They are beautiful, but I can't enjoy
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them. They weigh like a ton of bricks on my conscience. Sorry." Phoebe Judge: For him, the letters are artifacts
that are just as interesting as the pieces
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of wood. Ryan Thompson: This one has a little bit more
information on it. It's also sort of yellowed from age.
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It was sent, or received, sorry, on December
8th of 1982. And the park in the upper left-hand corner
has written a notation that says, "Conscience
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Letter 233". So this was like the 233rd letter that they've
cataloged in the conscience letter collection.
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And then the letter says, "This stone with
misfortune abounds!!" And there's a couple of exclamation points
after that line.
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"To you, I am now absolved." The name has been redacted, but it was sent
from Oakland, California.
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Phoebe Judge: Ryan Thompson's photographs
of the letters look stark and lie on all white
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backgrounds next to pictures of pieces of
returned wood. He collected them into a book called Bad Luck,
Hot Rocks.
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Ryan Thompson: It made a lot of sense with
some of the research I was doing into geologic
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materials, geologic ephemera events, and the
way we project human emotions and thoughts
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into these sorts of materials. So it just kind of bowled me over. Phoebe Judge: This is not the only place where
people return rocks.
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In Hawaii, there's a similar suspected curse
dealing with stolen lava rocks. People mail them back with $10, and companies
will do a ceremony and return the lava to
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its rightful place. Matt Smith says he gets that, the ritual of
return, absolving yourself of your crime.
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And even if the letters aren't on display,
he still receives and catalogs each one as
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it arrives. The letters are so touching though —
Matt Smith: They are. Phoebe Judge: ... part of them to see people
feeling guilty or afraid.
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Matt Smith: Yeah. Phoebe Judge: What's it like to handle those
materials? Matt Smith: It's fun and beautiful.
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I mean, there are certain letters where you
really get a sense of the person trying to
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right their lives in one way or another. You get this feeling that it's part of this
bigger effort on their part to fix things
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up. I've seen some letters that talk about having
— that the person who's sending it has had
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a scare with cancer or something like that
and they wanted to clean up their lives before
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they possibly passed away. Kind of getting right with their God, or whatever
it is that's motivating them.
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[Music.] Phoebe Judge: Criminal is produced by Lauren
Spohrer and me. Special thanks to Rob Byers and Casey Herman.
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Julienne Alexander makes original illustrations
for each episode of Criminal. You can check them out at thisiscriminal.com.
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We're on Facebook and Twitter, @CriminalShow. This week, our story "That Crime of the Month"
is featured on PRX's science podcast Transistor.
00:17:40
Transistor features shows like ours and scientist-hosted
episodes on everything from how telescopes
00:17:46
are like time machines to the gender biases
in science that we often overlook. Find Transistor on iTunes or wherever you
like to listen.
00:17:54
Criminal is a proud member of Radiotopia from
PRX, a collective of the 13 best podcasts
00:18:01
around. Check out the other shows at radiotopia.fm. And if you're interested in supporting us
and other shows like ours, email [email protected].
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Radiotopia is made possible with support from
the Knight Foundation and MailChimp, celebrating
00:18:16
creativity, chaos, and teamwork. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Jingle: Radiotopia, from PRX.
00:18:25
Petrified Forest National Park Orientation
Video: Time reveals itself here. It is frozen in the rocks beneath our feet,
and it flies by in the boiling clouds of a
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summer thunderstorm. It is a land of timeless impressions.