Looking at this landscape through biblical glasses, we see a rainbow of evidence confirming the global flood.
When the first migrants after Babel arrived in northeastern Arizona, imagine their wonder at the sight of rainbow-colored petrified logs scattered across the “painted desert” badlands. Colorful gray, red, pinkish-orange, blue, purple, and green layered hills; flat sandstone-topped mesas; sculptured buttes; and hoodoos (tall, thin spires of soft rock with a cap of hard rock) make this deeply eroded, barren landscape a breathtaking sight to behold.
Fast forward about 4,000 years to the mid-nineteenth century when a US team surveyed an east-west route across the area. This route paved the way for roads and a railroad which would bring hordes of tourists filled with the same wonder at this painted desert. In 1906, the US government turned the land into Petrified Forest National Park, in part to supervise tourists eager to pocket chunks of the fossilized wood as souvenirs.
This desert still attracts nearly a million visitors every year, each wondering the same thing: How did these hills get “painted”? And how did the colorful petrified logs form? When visitors venture to the trails, the national park signs tell them a story of slow processes over millions of years. However, this landscape actually paints a different picture—one of a violent catastrophe that overtook this area not that long ago.
