From the Seattle Times:
Rare surprise for Yakima man: a forest of stoneVery cool -- there is more on this site here: A Miocene Forest Assemblage
Clyde Friend was bulldozing a driveway around his shop when he first saw them in the dirt: gleaming pieces of the past. A forest of stone, more than 15 million years old.
For the past five years, on this hillside above Yakima, Friend has been pulling out pieces of rare petrified wood, no two pieces alike. Branches, trunks and slices in sunset colors. Pieces purple and blue as mussel shells. Pieces like winter sky, gray and white and all the tones in between. Pieces that ring like a bell when struck.
In the process, this 50-year-old heavy-equipment operator, who lives in a motor home on his property among the sagebrush and the chukars, may have uncovered something scientists say would be very rare: a glimpse of an upright ancient forest of hickory, elm, maple and sweet gum from the Miocene Epoch, a time of mastodons and saber-toothed tigers.
And for sure, he got something else, too: a new life.
Though he worked hard to keep his find secret, word got out. Now Friend has found his normally quiet life besieged by collectors, curators and curiosity-seekers who manage to track him down on his remote hilltop redoubt to see his knee-high piles of petrified wood.
A local museum just paid him $150,000 for four short stumps, some polished slices and two tall trunks. And that was a discount price.
"I never knew there was anything like this," said Friend, who asked that his precise location not be disclosed. "I'm just a normal guy that goes out and beats the ground most days."
What makes Friend's find worth more than money is the fact that the ancient trees are still upright, said Thomas Dillhoff, a curatorial associate at the University of Washington's Burke Museum. Dillhoff has visited Friend often and acquired several pieces of his petrified wood for scientific study.
Vast areas of what is now Washington were covered with lava flows that seeped from cracks in the earth from about 17.5 million years ago until about 6 million years ago, scientists say. Pauses among the flows would have allowed forests to grow, only to be incinerated, entombed or displaced by the next rush of lava.
The well-known Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park at Vantage, Kittitas County, has lots of petrified logs, but they are strewn around on the ground. Scientists think they were transported by mud flow, then preserved in lava.
But scientists believe Friend's trees were first submerged upright in a lake, which would have kept them from burning when the lava came through. Pillow-shaped basalt around the trees is a clue that the lava likely cooled rapidly in the water as it oozed around the trees. Silica leached out of the lava, infiltrated the wood and preserved it as stone.
