Criminal - Triassic Park

Episode Date: July 17, 2015

The Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona has the largest collection of petrified wood in the world. The beautiful wood is more than 200 million years old, and visitors to the park often take a little piece home with them as a souvenir. But stealing the wood has serious consequences, both legal and, some say, supernatural.  See photographs of the conscience letters and learn more about Ryan Thompson's book here.  Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Today, Petrified Forest National Park is a barren land. But 225 million years ago, this landscape was much different. Huge trees reached into the skies 200 feet, and below, the first dinosaurs roamed the land. Come explore the Petrified Forest, America's very real Triassic Park. Four hours northeast of Phoenix, in what can only be called the middle of nowhere,

sits the Petrified Forest National Park. What we're hearing is the orientation video from the visitor center. What separates these lands from all others is petrified wood, bejeweled with quartz crystals, agate, jasper, amethyst, and other semi-precious gems. Nowhere else is there such a great collection of exposed colorful fossil trees petrified wood isn't actually wood it's rock the fossilized remains of trees that fell millions of years ago so it's wood that's turned into rock. And this park in Arizona has the greatest concentration of petrified wood on the planet. 125,000 acres full of beautiful-looking, 200-million-year-old stuff.

And not surprisingly, sometimes people take a piece home with them, a little souvenir. The temptation to possess a piece of petrified wood has decimated this irreplaceable resource. Can I have you step over to the car, please? Taking anything from the park is illegal. It is a federal offense, punishable by fines and or imprisonment. The park estimated they were losing one ton of petrified wood each month. Most of it smuggled out in people's pants. I am the ruiner of vacation.

We've actually joked about making T-shirts. My job is to ruin some people's vacation, is what they claim. This is Melissa Hulls, a protection officer for the park. So what was the last time you caught someone trying to steal wood? 45 minutes ago was the last time I caught someone taking petrified wood. It happens all the time? All the time. So what do you do? I mean, are you like secretly watching them or do you get a call? Yes. You're secretly watching? Yes. Sometimes we're in plain clothes, sometimes we're in uniform, but we do a lot of foot patrols. So

we are an active presence on the trails. But we are also up on hilltops with binoculars watching for specific human behavior that guilty people exhibit. What is guilty petrified wood stealing behavior? Guilty behavior. Let's see. Most people, when they're hiking on a trail don't look around them front and back and then bend over really slowly and drag something from the ground up their pant leg and put it in their pocket. So they're trying to be really sly about it. They're trying to be sly. Key word is trying. Park staff set up checkpoints so no car could leave the park without an inspection. They instituted fines, $250, for anyone caught with wood, no warnings. Still, the wood theft continued.

And park staff found themselves taking it kind of personally. They didn't want to be the mean park, the surveillance park, the park begging you to please behave like an adult and just not steal the petrified wood. But apparently, we're all a bunch of toddlers. And when we're told we can't have something, we want it so much more. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. What happens when you see the father with his little kids who has taken the wood and you have to go up and say, excuse me, sir, and there are like kids there? Unfortunately, in my experience, it's not the kids doing it,

it's Daddy taking it and blaming it on the kids because he doesn't think I'm going to cite the 5-year-old, which I'm not, but then I have to pull the father aside and say, why don't you try being a parent and stop blaming this on the kid? I know the kid didn't do it. The superintendent of Petrified Forest National Park is Brad Traver. He says they try to give visitors plenty of opportunities to do the right thing. We put a sign on the road as you approach the exit station saying that there would be an inspection ahead.

That's a relatively passive thing for us to do, and we still collect pieces of petrified wood between that sign and the entrance station every month. Do people just say, oh no, there's going to be inspection, and then they get it out of their car? They throw it out the window, yeah. Really? So you have a lot in this one little stretch. Yes. In that little hundred yards or whatever it is, there isn't any petrified wood that occurs naturally, so anything that's sitting on the ground there is thrown out the window. Park staff was working very hard to scare and shame visitors into doing the right thing.

And you could say that their tactics did end up working, just not in the way they'd intended. Last week, for whatever reason, was kind of a heavy week. I think we got four or five, you know, packages of wood and letters returned. The wood is coming back. You know, the wood itself is incredibly heavy and dense. And so a lot of the times, you know, they've been tumbled around and the boxes are a little bit beat up. This is Matt Smith, museum curator at the park. For decades, people who've stolen wood have reported strange happenings,

immediate bad luck, like getting fired or suddenly hurting yourself. They get so scared, they send the stolen wood back to the park, and they also send letters. The first letter we got was back in 1934 from a man who I believe was living in India and he mailed back a piece of wood and a letter and said that he had had some bad luck and you know was felt guilty and thought that the wood might have something to do with it and he sent it back. And they still come all the time and it's part of Matt Smith's job to open them up and see what the person has

to say. I'm just going to grab a handful here and pull them out. Let's see. We got one that says, Dear Superintendent, please return these petrified rocks to the forest. I took these over 20 years ago as a teenager. I'm very sorry. Thank you. The park took advantage of this and put the letters on display as a warning. If visitors didn't care about doing the right thing or getting a $250 ticket, maybe they would care about being cursed. I visited the park many years ago and read the museum bad luck stories on display. I am not superstitious. Well, now I am.

My wife purchased this rock many years ago okay so he bought it that means it was legal i i never had bad luck until i married until i married her we are good people and never do wrong to anybody but bad things keep happening to her and thus bad things happen to me by proxy unduly kicked out of college, identity theft, institutions lost our documents, health problems, loss of pregnancy, unexplicable, lost jobs without a real reason, just not a good fit, and many more bad and sad things.

Please restore this to its rightful place. Thank you. And they gave their names. Matt read us letter after letter. Listening to them, it's hard to work out why exactly people were so sorry, or where they would get the idea that stealing petrified wood causes bad luck. Unless they got the idea from the park itself, from all of the other letters the park has on display in its museum. So maybe people are cursed, or maybe they just want to participate. But with a lot of the letters, you get the feeling that the person writing isn't happy for some reason. And this

is their small way of making something right. Let's see. I've got a letter here printed in maybe 40 font or something. It's really big letters. It says, I found these rocks at a house I lived in and wanted to return them to where they belong. Thanks. I remember this. And there were, yeah, two small chunks of petrified wood, but then there was a big Ziploc bag full of shells from Florida, and it was just seashells. So I don't know how we got that. You might think that park staff would be heartened to see people coming to their senses and returning the stolen wood. But when a piece of wood is returned, rangers can't just go toss it randomly into the park.

They can't verify where it came from. And since they do receive things definitely not from the park, like a bag of seashells, they don't take any chances. So returned wood just gets chucked into a pile, an actual pile. Here's park superintendent Brad Traver. So the conscience pile is a collection of petrified wood that comes to the park from sources sometimes unknown, sometimes known, that we don't know where to put. The conscience pile is now the size of a pickup truck and sits down a service road at the far end of the park, like a sort of monument

to guilt and superstition. The story we've just told was the whole story for a long time. Horrible wood theft, one ton a month, the park was disappearing, and the steady stream of conscience letters was part of the proof. Finally, someone said, hang on, where did we get that one ton number? And then we started looking at the metrics that we had about the wood theft, you know, this ton a month figure. And we realized that in the vast majority, there was no evidence of large amounts of theft. And yeah, just all this sort of information started to not quite stack up. And we realized that there was almost a mythology built around the wood theft.

From here, the park brought in researchers to evaluate the situation. They pulled out archival photos of what the park looked like in the late 1800s, and then sent a photographer to photograph the exact same places today. They did this more than 200 times. As far as the camera's eye can see, we cannot detect much of a difference between photos taken 100 years ago and today, and that the experience that your grandparents had are almost exactly like what you're having today. And in fact, some cases, there's more wood exposed now than there was in the photographs that your grandparents took. And when your rate of erosion exceeds your rate of resource theft, you're probably doing a really good job.

The new researchers also studied the park's signs and language, and found that all of the tough guy stuff was having the opposite effect. It was sending the message that the wood was disappearing really quickly, so you better hurry and get yours before it's all gone forever. In the past few years, they've toned it down. They no longer play that dramatic orientation video. They've stopped threatening to arrest people. And the new approach is paying off. Visitors to the park are on the rise.

We don't want to be the park that says, did you steal any petrified wood? Are you sure you didn't steal any petrified wood? Did you see anybody else steal any petrified wood? That's not the kind of visitor experience we want people to have when they leave Petrified Forest National Park. We need to be – our first priority needs to be protecting the resources that we are charged with protecting. But we don't have to do it in a way that is unpleasant. We don't have to do it in a way that is unpleasant. We don't have to do it in a way that's even very public.

We should be clear. People are still stealing wood. Officer Melissa Hulls deals with them every day. I had a foreign individual who was well-endowed, who was trying to get away with putting the smaller pieces of petrified wood in her cleavage. And she did not speak a lot of English, but she was completely compliant and cooperative. When I contacted her and I said I knew where the petrified wood was and I needed it back, and before I could explain how I was going to search her, she started undressing in the middle of the parking lot to give me back the petrified wood. Just massive amounts came down out of her chest. Yes, very much so.

But this isn't the crisis they thought it was. It's more of a nuisance. As for the conscience letters, they aren't on display in the Park Museum anymore. They've put that narrative behind them. But you and I can still see some of them thanks to a photographer named Ryan Thompson. And it starts just straight away. They are beautiful, comma, but I can't enjoy them. They weigh like a ton of bricks on my conscience, period. Sorry. For him, the letters are artifacts that are just as interesting as the pieces of wood. So this one has a little bit more information on it. It's also sort of yellowed from age. It was sent or received, sorry, on December 8th of 1982. And the park in the upper left hand corner has written a notation that says conscience letter 233 so this was like the 233rd letter that they've cataloged in the conscience letter collection

and then the letter says this stone with misfortune abounds and there's a couple exclamation points after that line to you i am nowved. The name has been redacted, but it was sent from Oakland, California. Ryan Thompson's photographs of the letters look stark and lie on all-white backgrounds next to pictures of pieces of returned wood. He collected them into a book called Bad Luck Hot Rocks. It made a lot of sense with some of the research I was doing into geologic materials, geologic ephemera events, and the way we project human emotions and thoughts into these sorts of materials. So it just kind of bowled me over. This is not the only place where people return rocks. In Hawaii, there's a similar suspected curse dealing with stolen lava rocks. People mail them back with $10, and companies will do a ceremony and return the lava to its rightful place. Matt Smith says he gets that, the ritual of return, absolving yourself of your crime. And even if the letters aren't on display,

he still receives and catalogs each one as it arrives. The letters are so touching, though. They are. Part of them. To see people feeling guilty or afraid. What's it like to handle those materials? It's fun and beautiful I mean there are certain letters where you really get a sense

of the person trying to write their lives in one way or another you get this feeling that it's part of this bigger effort on their part to you know fix things up I've seen some letters that talk about having you know,

the person who's sending it has had a scare with cancer or something like that, and they wanted to clean up their lives before they possibly passed away. You know, kind of getting right with their God or whatever it is that's motivating them. Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohr and me. Special thanks to Rob Byers and Casey Herman. Julianne Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can check them out at thisiscriminal.com. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show. This week, our story, That Crime of the Month,

is featured on PRX's science podcast, Transistor. Transistor features shows like ours and scientist-hosted episodes on everything from how telescopes are like time machines to the gender biases in science that we often overlook. Find Transistor on iTunes or wherever you like to listen. Criminal is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of the 13 best podcasts around. Check out the other shows at radiotopia.fm. And if you're interested in supporting us and other shows like ours, email sponsor at prx.org. Radiotopia is made possible with support from the Knight Foundation and MailChimp, celebrating creativity, chaos, and teamwork. I'm Pho creativity, chaos, and teamwork.

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