Petrified Forest National Park

Petrified Forest National Park is a national park in Navajo and Apache counties in north-eastern Arizona, named for the large deposits of petrified wood it contains. It covers about 346 square miles of semi-desert shrub steppe and heavily eroded, colourful badlands, and averages around 5,400 feet in elevation; the northern part of the park extends into the Painted Desert. Park headquarters lies about 26 miles east of Holbrook along Interstate 40, which crosses the park roughly east to west alongside the BNSF Railway's Southern Transcon, the Puerco River and historic U.S. Route 66. The site was declared a national monument in 1906 and a national park in 1962. It recorded 559,254 recreation visits in 2024.

Where it is

Petrified Forest National Park is a national park near Holbrook, in Apache County. It is one of the national parks in this database, and appears in the statewide ranking of Arizona attractions.

How this ranking was reached

The score combines the published visitor count with public interest and tourism significance, which is what earns it high confidence. The weighting is explained in full on the methodology page, and every axis is broken out under Facts and sources at the foot of this page.

Note on the data: The 2025 series reports zero recreation visits for month 10, a reporting gap rather than a measured figure, so 2024 is used as the reference year.

Mentioned in

• Arizona protects its night sky in one set of places and uses it in another — Eight Arizona attractions hold International Dark Sky Park status and all eight publish visitor counts; twelve working observatories publish none.
• Arizona has three national parks, and one of them takes 77 per cent of the visits — Grand Canyon recorded 4,919,163 visits in 2024 against 1,505,623 for Saguaro and Petrified Forest combined — more than three times the other two together.

Sources

• Visitation: National Park Service Visitor Use Statistics(opens in a new tab)
• Public interest: Wikimedia pageviews (en.wikipedia, human traffic), 2024
• Coordinates and designations: Wikidata(opens in a new tab)
• County: U.S. Census geography via FCC Area API, resolved from coordinates
• Official site: https://www.nps.gov/pefo/index.htm(opens in a new tab)

Record last verified 2026-08-12.