Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park
4511 Huntzinger Rd
Vantage, WA
A hillside above the Columbia where whole logs turned to stone, including the rare petrified ginkgo, entombed by lava millions of years ago.
Ginkgo Petrified Forest is one of the strangest fossil sites in the country, a place where entire tree trunks have turned to solid stone. Most petrified forests preserve a handful of familiar species, but the logs here came from an unusually rich ancient forest, and among them are rare examples of the ginkgo, a tree that survives today only in cultivation and a few wild refuges in China.
The park spreads across desert bluffs above the Columbia River at Vantage, in the dry heart of Washington. It pairs deep geologic time with human history: a small interpretive center, a trail among the stone logs, and a set of Native petroglyphs saved from the rising river.
What Guests Love
- Seeing whole trees turned to stone, including the rare petrified ginkgo, a tree long vanished from the wild
- The interpretive center overlooking the Columbia, with polished cross-sections of ancient logs
- The Wanapum petroglyphs preserved at the site, pecked into the basalt long ago
- A trail among fossil logs in a wide-open desert landscape most travelers speed right past
Worth Knowing
- The fossil-log trail is exposed high desert, hot and shadeless in summer, so go early and carry water
- Collecting petrified wood in the park is prohibited; the specimens are protected
- A Washington Discover Pass is required to park
- The interpretive center keeps seasonal hours, though the trails and river shoreline are open more broadly
Details
Vantage, WA
Learn about Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park
How wood turns to stone
Millions of years ago, in the age when great floods of lava were building the Columbia Plateau, trees from a lush forest fell or washed into a shallow lake. There, waterlogged and buried in mud, they were shielded from rot and from the worst of the heat when later lava flows poured over the basin.
Slowly, mineral-rich groundwater seeped through the buried logs, replacing the wood, cell by cell, with silica until the trees became stone that still shows the grain and rings of the original wood. The lake setting is why so many different species survived here, and why the delicate ginkgo, rarely found petrified anywhere, turns up at this one hillside.
The petrified ginkgo
The ginkgo is often called a living fossil. It is the last survivor of an ancient lineage of trees, unchanged in form for a very long time, and in the wild it had all but disappeared before being kept alive in temple gardens and, later, city streets around the world.
To find it here, turned to stone in a Washington hillside, is a small marvel: proof that the tree once grew wild across this continent before the climate changed and the great lava flows reshaped the land. The park takes its name from that rare and famous fossil.
The Wanapum and the river
The Wanapum people have lived along this stretch of the Columbia for a very long time, fishing its salmon and traveling its shores, and they used the hard petrified wood exposed by erosion for tools and points. When dams raised the river in the twentieth century, petroglyphs that Native people had pecked into the basalt were at risk of being drowned.
Many of those carvings were moved and are now preserved at the park, where you can see the old images of people and animals up close. They are a reminder that this open, seemingly empty country has been a lived and traveled place for thousands of years.
Wildlife and seasons
The shrub-steppe here is home to marmots, jackrabbits, coyotes, mule deer, and rattlesnakes, with sagebrush songbirds and raptors overhead. Along the river, the reservoir shoreline draws waterfowl and fishers.
Spring is the gentlest season, when the desert greens briefly and wildflowers appear and the heat has not yet set in. Summer is hot and bright, fall is mild, and winter is cold and windy on the open bluffs, though the fossil logs are just as remarkable in any season.
Closest Boutels
The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.
Things to Do Near Vantage
Wild Horse Monument
About 3 miles east, above the Columbia
A hilltop sculpture of galloping metal horses overlooking the river gorge, reached by a short steep climb from a rest area on Interstate 90.
Gorge Amphitheatre
About 5 miles southwest, at George
One of the most scenic concert venues in the country, set on the rim of the Columbia River Gorge with a huge open view.
Columbia National Wildlife Refuge
About 25 miles southeast
Flood-carved channels, lakes, and shrub-steppe near Othello that host tens of thousands of migrating sandhill cranes each spring.