The Mellow Art of Meandering – New Mexico

A savage is not the one who lives in the forest, 

but the one who destroys it.

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Ah Shi Sle Pah, brain-like domes interspersed with toadstool-like hoodoos

This jarring erosive landscape leaves one looking over their shoulders for dinosaurs

Beautiful yet haunting…

The need to escape in nature gets stronger the longer I am hidden away from society due to the novel coronavirus.  A trip to safe, solitary, and remote areas of New Mexico was in order.  Up and down many bad, dusty, nearly inaccessible, and often mis- or un- identified dirt roads, I finally immersed myself in the Bisti Badlands and the Ah Shi Sle Pah Wilderness Area, near the Navajo Indian Reservation. 

If remote and primitive is for you, you would probably appreciate the areas listed above.  They are not for the faint of heart.  If feeling like you are the only living human for miles around enhances your aliveness, you would love to discover this northwest corner of New Mexico. 

After a very long 35-mile drive along grassy and windy high desert plains dotted with wild horses barely shedding their winter coats, protecting several newly born foals.  It is nice to finally roam free but I could just as easily get lost if not paying attention to my surroundings or to some simple rules such as following riverbeds upstream to go easterly, and downstream, to go westerly. 

These are places where you can allow yourself to see what is already there and let that guide you to your next destination, a natural flow, at your own pace.  Slow meanderings.

Dreamscape or Landscape: Ah Shi Sle Pah Wilderness Area

Here, nature seems to be in a mischievous mood.  Tall gnarly hoodoos look like the gathering of cloaked shamans in the middle of a vast ancient desert.  The tortuous landscape is filled with an endless maze of passageways and secret hiding spots that are mysterious, humorous, eerie, and awe inspiring all at once.  It is easy to expect a sudden tap on the shoulder at any moment, inviting you to be part of a primordial trance.  

Starting small, mostly exploded ‘ironstones’

Iron oxide tends to crystalize around organic deposits,

Usually a leaf or wood fragment is trapped within

They go from burnt orange to reddish brown and egg-shape to potsherds

Ah Shi Sle Pah was first discovered by world renowned American dinosaur fossil hunter Charles Sternberg, in 1921.  This whole badland (region marked by intricate erosional sculpturing, scanty vegetation, and fantastically formed hills) area is composed of banded multi-hued sandstone, petrified wood, and ancient dinosaur bone fossils.  Striped with layers of mudstone and sandstone, these Cretaceous Period (74-75 million years ago) rocks have yielded specimens of fossilized leaves, large petrified logs and stumps, shells, and fossils of crocodile and turtle bones.  Over 280 specimen fossils are on display at the New Mexico Museum of History and Science in Albuquerque.  

On the way to Fossil Hoodoo

Akin to a stroll through a garden on Mars?

Floating circular rocks

Photographic heaven, best at dawn and dusk when the light is kinder

Wilderness epiphany for some

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect

Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:

We murder to dissect.

Wordsworth

Fossil Hoodoo, softer rock topped with harder cap rock

Exotic, esoteric sculptures

Hoodoo aka tent rock, fairy chimney, or earth pyramid

Petrified log

The area was a coastal swampy conifer forest way back when

Inhabited by dinosaurs, leaving fossilized evidence in their wake

Petrified log not fully agatized

Meaning the silicon oxide (quartz) crystals have not filled the gaps in the cells

Not as sturdy or heavy, rather brittle and less colorful

I would call it Pagoda Hoodoo

Otherworldly quality of an austere alien landscape

Photos cannot convey the true impact of this earth-scape

So many shapes in such a vast space, so little time

Phantasmagoric formations of sandstone, mudstone, shale, lignite (coal)

Feel the history of the naked land all around you

Chocolate Mushroom Hoodoos

Almost like a stone forest

Imaginary world of bizarre rock formations and hoodoos

Ah Shi Sle Pah hoodoo (background – better colors at dusk)

Strange and picturesque badlands etched out of a most unlikely

and barren terrain of table-top desert

Some so crooked, it’s amazing they don’t topple over

Rock Garden

Mesas, buttes, badlands are staples of today’s western geography.

Molded by centuries of wind, water, and frost.

These fascinating formations have captured the imagination of many.

Often symbolizing the rugged individualism associated with the American West.

They look like toadstools surrounded by baked yellowing fragile bentonite

Ancient and desolate windswept landscape as far as the eye can see

‘Table’ supported by two hoodoos

Humans have lived in the area for more than 10,000 years

Much of this land is sacred to the Navajo and other tribes

Top of most dome-like formation is made of crunchy olive-color bentonite

Not a lot of vegetation due to high alkalinity of soil and poor drainage

The crisscrossing washes only see a few sad looking tumbleweeds

Shade for a lonely plant

Orange clinkers in foreground, hoodoos beyond

Folds upon folds upon folds

A lonely yucca plant adds another dimension to these wrinkled hills

The saddest part of my visit at Ah Shi Sle Pah. 

Baby kangaroo rat left to die near the front right wheel of my vehicle

Stayed alive until morning – no food, no warmth, no physical contact for nearly a day

It never made a sound

I moved its tiny dead body (less than 1.5” long) under wildflowers before I left

I cried for two days until I realized why this affected me so much

This little creature reminded me how I couldn’t help Mike when he died

I couldn’t help this tiniest of animal either 

Being so helpless is the worst feeling 

Nature's Artwork:  The Bisti Badlands / De Na Zin Wilderness Area

The San Juan Basin where the badlands I visited are located

Part of the Colorado Plateau

Once a riverine delta west of the shore of a large ancient seaway

Intermittently inundated by the advances and retreats of the sea

Swamps left behind large buildups of organic material

Today source of oil, gas, coal, and uranium

From: San Juan College, Spring 2014

At Bisti, it is as if the earth is trying to remind us

that it owes us no duty of hospitality.

Or as if the earth decided to strip-mine itself.

The entire landscape is in a state of disintegration.

Derek Turner

Clinker covered hills are a good focal point to help get oriented

Clinkers were formed during prolonged underground fires

They look very much like pottery, beautiful orange and red hues

Streambed quickly drying up

These rocks look like gems ensconced in the cracking mud

There was no water in any of the washes, yet it’s only mid-May

Lignite (black stuff to the right), clinkers (red top)

With little or no vegetation, you can see the bones of the earth

An early relative of T-Rex, the Bisti Beast (Bistahiaversor Sealey)

A therapod was discovered here in 1997 and excavated in 1998

It was a tad smaller than T-Rex at 30 feet

Variation in density = uneven erosion

Result of differential erosion whereby shapes are affected by mechanical

weathering of freezing and thawing cycles and through wind and water

Cracked Eggs in Egg Nursery

Carved out by braided streams that flowed through the landscape eons ago

When you think ‘alien’ and New Mexico, Roswell might come to mind, but ‘alien’ in this case is the wilderness area of the Bisti Badlands.  The rock formations are outlandish, surreal, fantastic, visually stimulating and gravity defying: colorful hoodoos, pinnacles, cap rocks, spires, natural arches, canyons, bizarre patterns laid out in secluded intricate mazes.  Your only companions while visiting are the wind or silence in this vast, harsh, and eerie backdrop.  A wonderland or eroded shapes, a desolation that fills you up.

Also called ‘Egg Factory’

The lack of trails or interpretive signs enhances the surprises at every corner

Offering a more personal experience…

I personally thing they look more like turtles

Petrified log with orange lichen

Overall impression is that in this place, plants and animals

have mostly thrown in the towel.

Thank you for magnificent sunset colors

Before I leave you, I’d like to share a thought I came across (from Derek Turner quoted above) as I researched the Bisti Badlands.  It poses the following question: Does how you experience a place depend on what you know about it and whether the history of a place is, in a way, part of the object of appreciation? 

To engage with the Bisti Badlands (or other places) is not merely to connect aesthetically with the landscape in its current form, but to relate with the place in all of its history, with the larger historical processes of deposition, weathering and erosion as much as the ‘final’ product. 

Enjoying an energy bar

To come here without any knowledge of the history is like ‘being transported into a concert hall just in time for the last notes of a symphony.’ Is it better to understand the whole (although we will never know the entire whole) or just the end result?  Does knowledge add enjoyment and richness, or does it taint and spoil?

Personally, I read a lot more about Ah Shi Sle Pah and the Bisti Badlands since my visit and I’ve learned a great deal that makes me appreciate it even more and want to visit again and again.  The more I know about this place, the humbler I become of what mother nature is capable of, its resiliency, its wisdom.  It follows the crescendos and diminuendos of a full symphony, not only the sudden rush of the finale.  In a society of instant gratification, it is nice to take time, learn, observe, and work hard to get a better understanding of the end – at least for me.  

This is a photo that inspired me to come here

But I never found the wings.  I now have more information so next time…

www.media.istockphoto.com