Painted Canyon Trail

Painted Canyon Trail is a 4.3-mile out-and-back from the east end of Painted Canyon Visitor Center parking to the signed Upper Paddock Creek Trail junction, about 2.1 miles each way. It begins along the plateau rim, then drops into the canyon past layered badlands and petrified wood. Allow about 1½ to 2 hours. Take in the broad view before you descend; from the canyon floor, you lose the whole panorama.

Start east along the rim. An early branch heads north and downhill, but it is the wrong turn. Keep going east until the Painted Canyon route itself turns left and descends. That small fork is easy to misread when you are ready to get down into the canyon.

The signed junction with Upper Paddock Creek Trail is roughly 300 feet below the trailhead. Turn around there for this hike. The climb back to the plateau repeats the descent in reverse, with smaller rises along the way; the longer connected Paddock route is a different outing. The dirt path moves from open rim country to the more enclosed canyon floor, so the walk changes character on the way down.

Look for preserved stumps and chunks of wood in white, orange and purple tones. Much of the park's petrified wood began as bald cypress in a swamp more than 65 million years ago. Sediment buried the trees before they decayed; silica-rich groundwater gradually replaced the wood with quartz. Some pieces still show the rings of the original tree. Leave them where they are.

Some ridges are capped with clinker, or scoria: sediment baked hard when a seam of lignite burned underground. Oxidized iron gives it the rusty color, and the tougher cap stays standing as softer rock erodes around it. Lignite was useful locally, too. In the 1880s Theodore Roosevelt and ranch hands shoveled coal from nearby hillsides for stove fuel.

Park at Painted Canyon Visitor Center, off Interstate 94 at Exit 32; the long trail starts at the east end of the lot. The visitor-center complex has seasonal information, restrooms, drinking water and picnic shelters, those facilities are at the trailhead, not along the route. The center is generally open May through October. The short Painted Canyon Nature Trail is a separate loop by the overlook. Pets are prohibited on all park trails.