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In the credit where credit is due department, the credit belongs to Patrick Fuchs.
He’s 41 years old and a graduate of Northern Arizona University. He lives with his girlfriend in central Phoenix, and he works at a locally owned pizza restaurant in Scottsdale.
He’s an amateur bird watcher and photographer (his Instagram account is @Patrickbird) and an avid hiker, which happens to be how he took perhaps the most famous photo that no one ever got credit for. Until now.
The picture is of a piece of petrified wood that over the millennia has crystalized into a type of richly colored quartz agate with crimson, amber and cream-colored hues running through it.
Last November, the photo began to go viral after it appeared in an online geology publication. It was posted to thousands of Facebook and Twitter accounts and was the subject of nearly two dozen discussion threads on Reddit, where it received thousands of comments and more than 100,000 votes.
In January, The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com wrote about the photo in a story picked up by USA Today, where it received more than half a million page views.
Attempts to find the photographer by searching meta-data from the myriad posts were unsuccessful.
Then several weeks ago, a friend contacted Fuchs to say that his photo had been used on someone’s Facebook page and had 150,000 likes.
“I was kind of annoyed, so I messaged them and said ‘hey, this is my photo, take it down,'” Fuchs told The Republic. “He messaged me back and said ‘how do I know this is your photo?'”
Fuchs replied that he’d posted it on his Facebook page two years ago, “and he’s like, ‘well, it’s been printed all over,’ and starts sending me links to geology newsletters, an archaeology magazine.”
He also sent a copy of The Republicarticle.
“I thought, ‘what in the heck is going on here?'” Fuchs said. “Who was on here and took my picture?”
At first he was angry, “but then I thought, who cares? I took this picture because I thought it was pretty and put it out there,” he said. “I went from being angry about it, I suppose, to just thinking like, oh, this is like neat, you know? I mean, it’s really everywhere.”
How Fuchs came to take the photo is a story in itself.
He’s an avid hiker — he used to run a large Facebook hiking group — and spent 10 months hiking the Arizona Trail, which runs from the Utah state line to the Mexican border. During the week he’d work his restaurant job, and on weekends he’d drive to whichever portion of the trail where he’d left off the week before and log another 20 or 30 miles.
“It was a bit of an all-encompassing adventure…that almost consumed my real life. I just had to go to town and get money and work and then jump back on the trail,” he said.
He started the adventure in 2017 and finished in May 2018.
Two months after “being off like in the woods every weekend and having this grand adventure,” his father died unexpectedly of a heart attack.
“It was awful, really unexpected. He was only 64.”
When he came back from the funeral in Iowa, he felt not just loss, but lost.
“I came back and I had just spent 10 months with every weekend in the mountains and this happened and I just wasn’t ready,” he said. “I found I wasn’t really appreciating returning to normal life.”
He still had his national parks pass that he’d used on the Arizona Trail, so he took a trip to Petrified Forest National Park in northeastern Arizona.
“During that time in my life it was a good place to go and kind of escape to. It’s not just the petrified wood,” he said. “The petrified forest is just part of the painted desert and it really kind of captured me.”
He estimates he visited the park 15 to 20 times before the government shut down at the end of 2018.
“It’s the type of park you’re allowed to just park and just wander around,” he said. “They have trails, but there’s also areas where you can literally just walk around.
According to the photo’s metadata, Fuchs took the picture about 5:45 p.m. on July 29, 2018, during one of his early trips to the park.
He shot it near an ancient dwelling known as the Agate House along a trail that doesn’t get a lot of use because it requires crossing a main road to get there.
“So I’m walking on that trail and, I don’t know, I’m just looking around because it’s a paved trail, which kind of opens up your ability to look around (because) you don’t have to worry about tripping and falling.”
He noticed the rock in the distance and walked toward it.
“I actually sat down cross-legged in front of it for 10 or 15 minutes” waiting with his iPhone camera for the sunlight to strike the rock just right through the clouds.
“And so I kept waiting for it to shine on that red and yellow, and I sat there taking five hundred photos of this thing because I knew that was my piece of wood.”
He posted the image on Facebook at 6:24 a.m. the next day with a caption that read, “you do this trip solo. your plan was to spend time at this ancient ruin constructed of petrified wood — the agate house. you wonder what life was like in such a crazy home on a windy plain where every tree is dead. when you finish there you head off towards the hills and find some of the most colorful petrified logs you can imagine.”
While he was commuting to the Petrified Forest, Fuchs began to distance himself from social media, particularly as the news of the world grew more grim and confrontational.
He also began planning his next big adventure. Having conquered the north-south Arizona trail, he and a friend hiked across the state east to west earlier this year blazing their own trail from the New Mexico state line to the California state line.
With that and everything else going on in his life, he never knew his photo had gone viral, but he’s OK with it.
“My mom thinks this is great,” he said.
“Yesterday, one of my friends is like, ‘dude, you’re on the home page of Reddit again,’ and I’m like, ‘what the — ?’ I’ve taken better pictures than that one, but it’s funny how the crowd decides.”
John D’Anna is a reporter on The Arizona Republic/azcentral.com storytelling team. Reach him at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @azgreenday.
Read or Share this story: https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2020/11/23/now-we-know-who-took-photo-petrified-wood-arizona/6343994002/
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