The Looney Tunes Badlands

The Bisti is, without a doubt, the single weirdest place I have ever been in my life. It turned my understanding of how natural formations came to be right on its metaphorical head. It is so bewildering that it exceeds description, but I will try anyways.

The BLM-managed Bisti/De-Na-Zin wilderness, as the name implies, has two named sections. The area these two wilderness areas cover is quite large, and trekking to the heart of the region and back is probably not feasible in one day. Both are known for absurd formations and an abundance of exposed petrified wood. It's extremely dry, and is prone to large amounts of blowing dust in the spring.

The Bisti has no developed hiking trails, nor are you able to follow anyone else's footprints except on the occasional sandy areas. I found some vague descriptions online of what direction to try going first, but ended up feeling like the coolest stuff I found was not there. It is very much a choose your own path adventure. I didn't take any GPS tracks to share with you. Admittedly, the view from the parking area is not impressive. None of the weird stuff is there to see unless you commit to really hiking in. But it's worth it.

On my first trip, I packed my things for an overnight backpacking adventure, and set into the wilderness in the early afternoon. The first encounter is a fairly large "plain" that is surrounded by small hills. Its inviting to look at, and suggests that one can use it as a little highway into the wilds. I first headed toward some of those low hills to see what I could find. A staircase-like arroyo winding through the large mounds was one of my first observations. The surface of the Bisti, it's flats and it's hills, are mostly shale. Its like clay, when packed in it is quite hard but other times, like on hillsides, it will collapse under your step. The hard parts look smooth and the soft parts are very pitted, almost looking like a thick gravel. This material seems to erode easily with rainfall, making the arroyos very dramatic in appearance. This was far from the weirdest thing I would see on this trip, but I was already pretty enamoured.

The shale came in hues of gray, yellow, red, and black. I'm sure the different colors are made of different compounds (and shale may not even be the right term for it), but I'm not a scientist. My first bewilderment of the region is that there are many mounds, hills of various colors in close proximity. One could be pitch black, and the one next to it would be vibrant red, and the space between them would change colors quite abrubtly. The entirety of the Bisti is not as dull looking as the drive to the parking area may suggest.

The next oddity I observed was an abundance of small caves and tube-like erosions. The Bisti is filled with pits, crevices, holes, and small caverns. Most of them are too small to walk in, but I did find a few that I could walk into. I wonder what formed these. I often found myself looking at things that were obviously eroded by water, but didn't actually make any sense to me. The pipe-like formations that went up and down seemed to defy gravity, I was staring at things wondering what could possess water to do that. It almost seems like the water was jetted through the ground, like there was a lot of pressure. There is also an abundance of paths that the water cut straight through a mass of shale, but these made sense because one could track where the water flows horizontally. At least some things make sense, but a lot of it simply did not.

Then comes the petrified wood. Its essentially an ancient log that turned into a rock. There were surely trees here at some point in the past, but the petrified wood that is here is just casually sitting on the ground as if someone just plucked them out from someplace else and just set them down there. It's fascinating and fun to find.

There are some deposits of pristine looking sand, perfectly rippled from the wind. There are no dunes of it that I found, but the bottom of some bluffs and hills would have pools of it. It looks soft, I want to run my hands through it.

Now, the hoodoos. And weird balancing rock formations? A lot of this stuff looks like clay mushrooms. Some of it looks like big massess of very solid rock sitting on thin pillars of softer looking material. The colors of the heads and stems of these formations can be completely different. They look like little goblins created them. Some are small, and others are sitting well above the head and into the sky. These multicolored cliffs, rock deposits, and hoodoos need to be seen to be understood or believed. And also, flats between the hills with many rocks and boulders interspersed, just sitting on the ground as if someone arranged them.

I set up camp at the base of a shale hill. The place I decided to sleep was not quite as extravagent as what I had seen so far or what I would see in the morning, but it was still inviting and I enjoyed it. I cooked dinner and drank tea. As the night went on, I noticed that it was completely silent. No sound of insects or plants blowing in the wind of any kind. Just silence. I really liked it. I walked out under the moonlight and drank it all in. Silence, a great view of the night sky (as anywhere away from the cities), and plenty of room to walk. I had a peaceful day exploring and a peaceful night appreciating.

In the morning, I took a new route. I found a lot of red stuff. And I do mean red, very vibrantly so. I wound through the hills for a couple miles, not finding a lot of hoodos but definitely weird caves and tunnels carved by water. More and more weird stuff here. At this point I was heading back to my car because i was running out of water. And then I left, not to return for over a year.

My second trip, I had driven there for hours, only to realize once I was getting close that the horizons were very hazy from blowing dust. I knew it would be a bad idea to go out but again, I packed the overnighter bag and set out into the badlands. It was extremely windy, and dusty, and by the time i made it a couple miles in, my eyes were irritated. I did find some cool areas and took some good pictures though.

Eventually I tried to set up camp, but it was a disaster. The intense wind ripped my tent stakes out of the soft ground, and my food cooker was collecting lots of dust into my food. I realized this was a lost cause and packed my things up, trudged directly into the wind for two miles, and left to go back where I came from. My eyes were filled with dirt, and I'm lucky I didnt get some sort of eye or respritory infection. I was still happy to see the Bisti again.

This place is really unique, and I'm glad that I went. It is a place of extremes, very dry, very dusty, very barren of life, very bizarre.