I forgot something!

I forgot something that was really neat at Yellowstone!!

One of the first things we saw in the park was a HUGE petrified tree. The placard says that tree is of course thousands of millions of years old and ridiculous notions like that, but what was especially interesting was that it is a REDWOOD tree!! It says that samples of the tree compared to samples of the big redwoods are identical. It says that when the volcano occurred that caused the big caldera there were three big redwood trees in that spot that were covered in volcanic ash and petrified. As the ash eroded souvenir hunters chipped away the other two trees, taking pieces home and completely removing two trees. You can see old pictures of the stumps of the others before they were completely destroyed. The park rangers installed a fence around what remained of the third one to protect it from being taken out piece by piece.

It is mind-boggling to think of how different our world would have been when God created it -- things must have been vastly different just in Yellowstone to support the thriving growth of three ENORMOUS redwood trees!!! It seems unimaginable that Redwoods were this far Northeast!!! It was VERY neat!