Below are some images from the Painted Desert. The Painted Desert is a desert of badlands in the Four Corners area of Arizona, some of which extends in to the Petrified Forest National park. Declared a national park in 1962 to preserve the broad representation of a Late Triassic paleo-ecosystem, the park contains a wide variety of things to check out: the Painted Hills are an interesting geological sight, petrified wood and other fossils, and evidence of human culture dating back 13,000 years.