http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20040803/ap_on_re_us/petrified_alaska

NGA ISLAND, Alaska - If you want to stroll through the only forest in the Shumagin Islands, you have to wear rubber boots and wait until the tide goes out.

In the Shumagins, where the wind never seems to stop, the few live trees were planted by people. But along a stretch of beach on the northwest corner of Unga Island, there's a grove that hasn't grown for millions of years.

Wind and water have worn away a 50-foot bluff to reveal a forest of petrified tree stumps that appear to be marching into the ocean. Unga is the largest of the dozen or so Shumagin Islands, 570 miles southwest of Anchorage near the tip of the Alaska Peninsula.

"It's like there was a great big Paul Bunyan — chopped them off all even," said Bill Dushkin, president of Shumagin Corp., the Alaska Native village corporation for Sand Point, which owns the land under the trees.

The trees are one of the oddities of Alaska, right up there with warm-blooded dinosaur fossils found north of the Brooks Range on the North Slope. The trees are believed to be sequoia, which grow in northern California, or metasequoia, now found mostly in China. Neither apparently have any business being so far north.

The petrified forest, much of it below tide line, covers about five miles of beach. On a sunny day, the petrified tree stumps stand out white and bright against the gray-black beach rock. From the bluff, they look like marshmallows on charcoal.