BISTI BADLANDS

AUGUST 2023 - NEW MEXICO, USA

OTHERWORLDLY LANDSCAPES

The Bisti Badlands/De-Na-Zin Wilderness is a sprawling geologic formation south of Farmington, New Mexico on the Navajo Nation. Formed the remnants of an ancient inland sea, these high-desert landforms are otherworldly in their unusual beauty. Translated from the Navajo word Bistahí, Bisti means "among the adobe formations." De-Na-Zin, from Navajo translates as "Standing Crane." Petroglyphs of cranes have been found south of the Wilderness. It is on the Trails of the Ancients Byway, one of the designated New Mexico Scenic Byways. The Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness is the largest area of badlands in the San Juan Basin that is easily accessible to the public. The badlands expose the longest, most complete, and most richly fossiliferous sequence of beds spanning the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary in any single sedimentary basin in the world.

Alien Throne stands in the Valley of Dreams, a remote field of hoodoos on Navajo Nation land in the northwestern New Mexico badlands. It’s filled with petrified wood — even petrified trunks and branches — and is rich with fossils. It’s just outside the Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah Wilderness, where paleontologists discovered not the Triceratops, but the Pentaceratops. Alien Throne is a hoodoo. They’re formed by erosive forces like wind, rain, and flowing water beating away at stacked layers of soft and hard rock. The softer layers wear down relatively quickly, but the harder layers resist for longer — eventually, we’re left with impossible shapes. Hoodoos tend to have hard “cap rocks” on top, which protect the soft layers, and alien features, below.