First real stop on this Houston to San Francisco road trip was the Bisti Badlands, also known as the De-Na-Zin Wilderness. This is a little-known wilderness area outside the town of Farmington (which, by the standards of northwest New Mexico, is a huge city). It is a very strange place. It was apparently once a swampy river delta near an ancient sea 70 million years ago, which would be a couple million years before an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. Somehow that has resulted in some strange geology, including the rounded rocks with cracked shells in the cover image, which look for all the world like eggs from some alien. There are also deposits of limestone in weird formations that after the softer stone wore away became hoodoos with precarious caps. Meanwhile, some of the vegetation from this ancient swamp became coal, while other vegetation became petrified logs.
To be honest, the Bisti Badlands are more interesting to visit than they are to photograph. It's hard to capture the essence of that place in photos. It didn't help that in the desert sun everything was washed out, even though we were there at 6 PM. You might argue that we could have stayed until the last rays of the sun, but this place really is in the middle of nowhere and it took 8 hours of driving to get there. The summer sunset is around 9 PM, so really nobody wanted to stick around, hungry and tired, for the perfect light. Also, this relatively small valley along a river bed has no (zero) marked trails, so the risk of getting lost was quite real (although it wouldn't take a genius to just follow the riverbed back to the car).
