45,000-acres of Badlands
Morning was rising as we crept into the gravel lot of the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness area. An established trailhead that leads curious hikers into its rolling landscape of badlands. This expansive area offers some of the most unusual scenery in the Four Corners Region.
The trail leads out of the lot for about 50 yards and through a barbed-wire fence, then it's wide open range to roam. Pick your direction, and into the badlands you stray.
We departed on flat ground and will stay that way throughout the excursion. Just over a mile in, the air is chilled and static as a welcomed gift. We approach some bizarre rock formations as I remove my lens cap and squint at the stone-capped subjects paraded before me. Creating an eye for angles to portray the spirit of ancient rock formations comes naturally. However, the crunchy, crackled clay surface has me pondering how to reveal these sedimentary textures. Wrapped in silence and the soft brush of morning light, we venture deeper into the surreal badlands, where a massive petrified log juts from the earth like an ancient bone on display, and hoodoos stand frozen like tribal sentinels welcoming the daylight as it attaches to them.
Pausing often, my eyes dart between the sculpted terrain and the growing light on the horizon. "Light's coming fast," and the spirit embedded in the badlands is awakening. Hiking a few more miles in, we approach a surreal scene justly named the Alien Egg Hatchery — a quiet, haunting, and untouched area that feels like a forgotten alien nursery.
The landscape is a visual mystery, blurring the line between geology and science fiction. A surreal stretch where cracked stone "eggs" rest like fossils from another world. Weathered by time, these bizarre layered shell-like formations seem mid-hatch, as if something ancient and otherworldly once stirred inside. The outskirts of the hatchery are surrounded by eerie hoodoos and petrified trees. It's the kind of place where your mind meanders into fictional spaces, rarely imagined.
Just around the corner, we sidewind along a wash, weaving through the eroded mounds displaying streaked reds, purples, ashen grey, and charcoal black lines. The stillness feels sacred—no birdsong, no buzzing flies, just a stillness and silence as we were lured into the entrance of an unknown labyrinth of crackled pillars.
Enticed by unrealistic beauty, we unknowingly saunter into the realm of bizarre cone-shaped hoodoos fashioned with flat stone caps. Carelessly, we become entwined in a labyrinth, where facades repeat and deceive, columns shift shape, and orientation fades. Yet the austere and radiant silence pulls thought into a pattern and into a quagmire of awe.
You think you're as far back as you can go, and then another opening is revealed, and you stray deeper into the mystic, confined riddle. Every turn of your head is an exertion of awareness. I feel confined in a maze of distorted orientation, trying to navigate turns of identical pillars. The sheer beauty and austerity keep my mind busy, capturing images. Spires stretch impossibly above, trimming sky and canyon alike, and the way out became just another illusion we chose to follow.
Click on the photos below to enlarge.
Back to the sanity of the main wash, the sun spills molten gold over the strange landscape. Shadows stretch across the ground as we approach another ever-bizarre scene. We stopped beneath a towering formation shaped like a ship's prow—with a man being thrown overboard. Erosion has sculpted it delicately, a balancing act of stone and time. I stepped back to capture its impossible shape. "Looks like it should crumble at any moment." "It's been standing for a million years. Patience makes improbable things possible."
Later, beneath the sun's blaze, we shared lunch in the shadow of a bizarre outcropping. Our eyes drifted to the jagged horizon.
By late afternoon, the light had mellowed to amber. We hiked south out of the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Badlands and out of dreamscapes of alien eggs, spires, fluted hills, and stone giants.
A perfect composition—timeless, vast, and humbling.
To view more photos and blogs, venture onto my site by clicking EFlattVisualart.com
Credits:
The State of New Mexico, Navajo Reservation, Mother Nature