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| Petroglyphs at Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park |
The year was 1927 and Washington state highway crews were hard at work building what today we know as the Vantage Highway. As they carved a wide swatch through the rolling hills overlooking the Columbia River, they encountered hunks of strange rock that resembled tree logs.
Fast forward a few years to about 1930, when George F. Beck, a professor at Central Washington College of Education in Ellensburg was teaching an independent studies class (as well as science and music classes). One of his students, Perry Orr, brought him examples of petrified wood he had found in the Vantage area and asked if he could write a paper on his discovery.
Beck gave his approval and began to wonder where the student had uncovered the specimens. While he didn’t follow up on that question initially, Orr’s project intrigued him and he filed the information away for future consideration,
About a year later, Beck was driving on the Vantage Road along the Columbia River and spotted a man walking down from the hills, carrying a large piece of petrified wood. He recalled Orr’s project and decided to follow up.
A short time later, with the help of his students, he organized the first formal excavation of the site where he had seen the man with the hunk of ancient wood. Over the following months, Beck and his students identified several varieties of prehistoric trees including one that was unexpected: samples of petrified ginkgo trees, a species no longer found in North America.
Recognizing the value of the site, Beck began lobbying government officials to designate the area a park or monument in order to protect it from vandalism. Initially, he and state officials hoped the National Park Service would take over the property and establish a National Monument site, but found little appetite for the plan among park officials in Washington D.C.
In 1933, Beck sought to persuade Washington legislators to designate the area as a state park. In 1935, the Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park was created. As key part of its creation was the state’s acquisition of a ten-acre plot from Ellensburg’s Smithson Sheep Company through a land swap.
Additionally, in April 1935, the federal government awarded a federal work-relief grant to the park, which brought with it about 200 Civilian Conservation Corps members to help excavate the site. They would work on developing the new park until 1938.
Along with uncovering fossilized wood, CCC crews built trails and several buildings, including the Trailside Museum structure adjacent to the Vantage Highway, a garage, and restrooms. The museum building also included housing for a caretaker. All of the buildings were constructed in the distinctive stone style that defined many CCC projects at the time.
Among the walking paths carved by the CCC crews was the Tree of Stones Interpretive Trail that led to the fossilized logs left on site. Protecting the petrified wood hunks were stone and iron cages, which can still be seen in the park.
The CCC staff also constructed a trail a few miles from the museum that led to basalt columns overlooking the Columbia River that were covered with petroglyphs or prehistoric Native American rock art and a small visitors center at Vantage. The new park officially opened in 1938.
Always an advocate for his discovery, a year later Beck wrote a booklet, “Life History of Ginkgo Petrified Forest,” in which he called the park “the largest and best of the many stone forests through Central Washington.”
He explained that the site had yielded an estimated 200 different tree types “many of them Eastern American, some of them Asiatic, and few of them subtropical in character.
“No fossil forest in the world approaches the Ginkgo Petrified Forest in the kinds of trees present. No other forest in the world is known to have been buried and preserved in liquid lava,” he continued. “The forest was named after the most interesting fossil of all time, the sacred tree of China and Japan; however, the number of these ginkgos in the forest is not large.”
So, what caused so many different types of trees to become preserved so well in stone on a lonely patch of land overlooking the Columbia River?
According to geologists, about 15.5 million years ago, during the Miocene Period, that part of Central Washington was very wet and humid. The landscape largely consisted of swamps and shallow lakes surrounded by dense forests.
Around the lakes grew species of trees that thrived in wet climates, such as swamp cypress, while deciduous (sun-loving) trees, like gingko (now found only in Asia), maple, walnut, oak, sycamore, and horse chestnut, grew well on the hillsides. And just as today, stands of Douglas fir, hemlock, and spruce flourished at the higher elevations.
At some point in the distant past, volcanic eruptions in the region buried some of the trees in volcanic ash, which was subsequently covered by flows of basalt. Over time, the organic material in the tree remains was gradually replaced by minerals in the ground water. The end result was petrified wood or stone logs made of silica that took on the characteristics of the trees.
Geologists believe that near the end of the Ice Age, during the terrain-changing Missoula Floods (about 18,000 to 12,000 years ago) in Central Washington, the raging waters eroded the basalt and exposed some of the preserved petrified wood.
Which is how things remained until the Vantage Highway construction crews began digging up the area in the late 1920s.
After the park’s opening, there was a brief spurt of interest in seeing the petrified forest remnants, but, with the advent of World War II, visitation began to decline.
According to historian Cassandra Tate, “few people visited the park during the years of World War II. Caretakers were employed only intermittently. The buildings fell into disrepair. Some state officials and parks department employees began to think that the park was impractical.”
That situation changed in the 1950s, when the state of Washington decided to enlarge the small visitors center into a museum/visitors center and expanded the park’s size.
Additionally, in 1958, work began on construction of the 185-foot-high Wanapum Dam on the Columbia River, about five miles downriver from the park. The reservoir formed behind the dam, however, would inundate the petroglyph site near the park.
According to the Washington State Parks’ history of the park, a local women’s group suggested removing the stone carved artwork to the new Ginkgo Museum (now known as the Ginkgo Interpretive Center).
A retired mason and stone cutter named Bob Atwell volunteered to help save the stone images. Working with a nearby resident, Clarence Scammon, the two cut and blasted the petroglyphs from the stone columns on which they had been carved thousands of years ago. The massive panels and columns were then lowered to a raft on the Columbia and floated across the river.
According to the Washington State Parks, a handful of pieces were lost overboard during the move. Once the artwork reached a landing, it was loaded onto a truck and taken to the museum to be displayed. In all, about 100 rock images were salvaged before they were submerged in the reservoir.
In 1965, the Ginkgo Park was designated a National Natural Landmark. Additionally, in 1975, the Washington State Legislature named petrified wood as Washington’s official state gem.
Last year, the Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park, which has grown to encompass 7,644 acres, including camping at the Wanapum Recreation Area adjacent to the Columbia River, hosted more than 163,300 visitors.
Interestingly, the discovery of the Ginkgo Petrified Forest wasn’t the last important geological find by George Beck. In 1935, it was announced that he had discovered a nearly complete “mold” in solid lava of a prehistoric mammal, a Teleocerus, which is an ancestor to the rhinoceros. The unusual formation in rock was located in a bluff at Blue Lake near the future site of Grand Coulee Dam.
According to the August 22 edition of the Bellingham Herald, Beck hypothesized that millions of years ago the animal must have been lying in water and was completely covered and encased in lava. Apparently, the water helped preserve the body of the animal while the lava hardened around it.
“Eventually it disintegrated somewhat,” the newspaper reported, leaving behind the creature’s mold in stone.
“Many of the bones remain in the cavity, and etched in the lava are the complete details of the head, body, and legs of the animal, so distinct that the animal’s two horns, three-toed feet, nostrils, skin and hair are easily discernible,” the Herald said.
Beck said scientists planned to make plaster casts of sections of the mold or outline of the creature. “Geologically, this is just like seeing a ghost or an angel,” Beck told the newspaper.
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