A trip to the Bisti Badlands (aka “De-Na-Zin Wilderness”) is a trip to an alien world, where it’s easier to imagine the eons of time past. Badlands are landscapes in which vast amounts of clay soils and sedimentary rock have eroded, leaving scant vegetation, and often leave behind unusual rock formations from the denser minerals less subject to decay.
The Bisti Badlands are amidst the Navajo lands in some of the most remote parts of the United States, off a dirt path miles from any cell reception. No drones or any wheeled vehicles are allowed, and there are no marked trails. (When I traveled there yesterday, I brought maps I had downloaded, which is not optional.)
Wikipedia sums up one if the coolest aspects of this place better than I could: “The badlands expose the longest, most complete, and most richly fossiliferous sequence of beds spanning the Cretaceous-Paleogene [K-Pg] boundary in any single sedimentary basin in the world.”
The K-Pg boundary this quote refers to is the meteor event that destroyed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Made up of 45,000 acres, Bisti is a geologists’ and paeolontologist’s dreamscape. The fantastic sandstone shapes emerging from the ground testify to an ancient world — we hiked to a fossilized tree, and saw the horizontal bands of distinct rocks that had formed millions of years ago. The areas we viewed were some of the oldest exposed rocks, appearing when the shallow seas that had bisected New Mexico abated over 70 million years ago.
