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California has several remote locations where petrified, or fossilized trees and plants can be found. These trees may have been caught in a volcanic eruption and buried swiftly in ash, they may have been swept downstream in a storm and then were buried in sand for hundreds of thousands of years, or they may have been calcified out on a Channel Island.

Here are a few examples describing the petrified forest in Sonoma :

In Sonoma County is a privately owned petrified tree forest open to the public.

http://www.petrifiedforest.org/history1.html

The same forest offers an explanation for how such a forest came to be

http://www.petrifiedforest.org/geo.htm

Here is Robert Louis Stevenson’s account of visiting this same petrified forest in 1879

(RLS Silverado chapter 2.doc)