Stone forests, ancient hues.

• Author: Malatesta, Parisina
• Position: Fossilized tree trucks in Patagonia's protected parks - Argentina - Illustration

Crossing the solitude of Patagonia by car, a harsh wind blows across the arid soil, rain less and riverless. Our destination was the petrified forests formed by gigantic trees--the largest in the world and covering the most extensive area on the planet--struck down millions of years ago in their prime.

There are many such forests in Patagonia, and the landscape is strewn here and there with the remains of silicified trunks. The most spectacular and valuable fossilized deposit in Argentina is the Jaramillo Petrified Forest, which covers seventy-five thousand acres. The oldest such site, it was declared a Natural Monument in 1954 and contains trees 150 million years old, with the best preserved, longest, and thickest trunks of all.

Located northeast of the province of Santa Cruz, ninety miles from Puerto Deseado, the reserve takes its name from a nearby village, although it is also known by the name of its most prominent landmark, Mother and Daughter, a cleft-shaped, thirteen-hundred-foot hill with fantastical light-colored basalt columns lining its sides.

It is a three-day trip from Buenos Aires to Santa Cruz along Route 3, which links the remote towns on these plains as it runs beside the sea bordering Patagonia. A few hours later, after passing through the village of Fitz Roy then continuing thirty miles east on a riprap road made of the rounded stones found throughout almost all of Patagonia, we arrived in the Jaramillo Forest.

This thick layer of cobbles was a source of amazement to Charles Darwin in 1834. "One is awestruck to think that each of these stones has been rolling slowly over the course of an incredibly long time," he noted. "As numberless as the grains of sand in a desert, they would, if piled into a gigantic mound, reach as high as a great mountain chain."

In the vast Patagonian space, the tree trunks sustain a vision of immensity. Around them, nothing but desert. Nothing but fossils. Nothing but dinosaur tracks and the strange shapes of hypnotic hills following one after another in isolation, a series of flat-topped cones. Among them one sees these fallen colossuses as a fantastic image or perhaps a scene from another world that inevitably poses to the traveler the question of what tremendous force could have laid them low.

The varied colors of the trunks, predominantly reddish tones, contrast sharply with the sandy soil, which contains very little organic material and is strewn with rust-colored rocks.

Every detail of the...