Today is our day off. We have worked 4 straight days and have ended our first week here at PEFO. We each put in a little over 36 hours; NPS rules say that we need 32 hours total in exchange for the RV site and full hook up. But who is keeping track…?

The weather has been phenomenal. It is way too hot in the sun but chilly for short sleeves and shorts in the shade. Is this great or what? We’ve had mostly sunny weather but had an afternoon and evening of rain and a day of clouds. This is the view of the Painted Desert from the Painted Deseret Inn (PDI) which is one of our favorite stations to work at. When the Fred Harvey Company became the concessionaire at the PDI in 1947, Mary Coulter was brought in to redesign the Inn’s interior. One of her significant changes was to add three large picture windows overlooking the Painted Desert. This is looking through one of them.

One great thing about working at the PDI is watching the changing weather and cloud patterns cast their shadows as they move across the Painted Desert. Fortunately on Thursday afternoon, I was working the PDI and got to see rain and hail clouds sweep across the desert. Awesome sight.

There are three work locations in the park. The north entrance is right off an exit of I40, and the majority of folks stop at this entrance. The place they come to first even before they go through the fee station and officially enter the park is called the Painted Desert Visitor Center. There are usually two of us working behind a counter answering questions and running cash registers. Since this is the first time visit for many, the main interaction with the visitors is explaining the one road through the park and the things to see. We generally work a 4-hour shift and then move on to PDI for a 4-hour shift or come from PDI after having worked a 4-hour shift. Anyway, it is nice to only be in one place for 4 hours; it helps to keep us fresh.

Connecting the north end of the park with the south end of the park is a 28-mile park road. There is only this one road in the park and I assure folks that they can’t get lost. At the end of the road on the south end is our third work location. It is called the Rainbow Forest Museum. Located in this building is a typical visitor center as well as a museum that is focused on geology and paleontology. Two people also staff the museum/visitor center doing similar things that are done at the north end. The dominant question on the south end is not “what is there to see” but “who cut the logs”?  

The volunteer not only helps out in the museum but will also go out to other stops along the park road and “rove” or be present to talk to people. We might be standing in this location talking about how petrified wood was formed, why it is in this location, and why the Painted Desert is a painted desert. The nice thing about this is we are not stuck behind the same counter for an 8-hour shift but are able to have a variety of things to do.

The park is much busier than we had remembered when we were here in the fall of 2013. March is the time for spring breaks, and we do see families with young kids. But we see more people that look like us. And, we see lots of RV’s coming through the park even though there is no camping in the park except for back country permits in the wilderness areas. The prevailing theory for all the Q-tips passing through the park is the increase in Baby Boomers retiring and the relatively cheap gas. The Boomers are now experiencing the great out of doors and the natural beauty of this country. Good for all of us!

And I leave you with a close up of why people come here: petrified wood.