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Petrified Forest, Calistoga
The Petrified Forest in Calistoga is the kind of painful roadside attraction that your dad would have insisted on stopping the family station wagon to visit when you were a kid. This California Historical Landmark features a collection of petrified trees up to 8 feet in diameter and 65 feet long. The forest, which attracts thousands of visitors every year, is the result of a volcanic eruption three million years ago that covered the giant redwoods here with a pale yellow ash, decomposing the trees and leaving behind these crystallized silica shapes. In the 1860s a local, 'Petrified Charlie' Evans unearthed the first tree and started to charge admission to the forest. Early visitors included naturalist Luther Burbank, scientist O.C. Marsh, and the underwhelmed Robert Louis Stevenson.
[ MAP A-9 ]