Bad Luck, Hot Rocks

Bad Luck, Hot Rocks
by edited by Ryan Thompson and Phil Orr
Adopted by
Sarah & Dale Schian
on March 4, 2017
Bad Luck, Hot Rocks:  Conscience Letters and Photographs from the Petrified Forest

Bad luck, hot rocks : conscience letters and photographs from the Petrified Forest

By edited by Ryan Thompson and Phil Orr. Los Angeles, CA: Ice Plant , 2014.

There is a commonly held superstition that illicitly removing specimens of petrified wood from Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park is bad luck. As a result, the National Park Service receives many of these returned rocks with “conscience letters” of regret from over the years. The letters have been carefully archived and the purloined samples are now in a “conscience pile” at the end of the park property. The rocks cannot be distributed on the park land as the exact provenance for each piece can never be known, and areas need to be kept as pristine as possible for future research. This book is full of photographs of the entertaining and sometimes heartbreaking letters and notes that accompanied the returned samples.

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Adoption Type: Build and Access the Collection